Personal News! Photography Feature Award

I just received a First Place: Feature Photography from the Society of Professional Journalists

Be Nguyen in his tailor shop, 2019.

I want to share some great news with my subscribers that I just received. The Western Washington chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists just awarded me First Place for the “Feature Photography” for the photos I made for the series “Unbroken Threads,” a story on the Nguyen family of tailors in Seattle.

I wrote about the family when I first published the series last spring:

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I started photographing Be — the patriarch of the family — in 2017 and kept at it for several years. Then in late 2024, I saw that his small Pioneer Square shop was boarded up. It was a huge loss for the neighborhood and —I won’t lie — a huge loss for me! Be didn’t speak much, but he always — and I mean ALWAYS — invited me in whenever I showed up with a camera and let me do my thing.

The short of the story is that he was diagnosed with a serious lung ailment that forced him to retire. I only knew him from his shop, so it took me a bit to track him down. When I did, I discovered that his wife and daughters had been running their own tailor shop in South Seattle for over two decades.

And it was only a matter of time before the fuller story of their emigration to Seattle from Vietnam in the 1980’s came out, a story that included bribery, imprisonment, a capsized boat, a daughter held hostage, two refugee camps, and a decade of family separation.

That’s how my article came to be.

Tiffany Nguyen (in mirror) and her mom Nhung at her machine.

I just wanted to share the news. You all have been supporting me these past years. You have no idea how much it means that I can publish here with the knowledge that a diverse group of intelligent, thoughtful, and creative eyes will read what I’ve written and take in my photos. I’m tongue-tied in expressing my gratitude for you. It’s huge!

Since this is the first photography award I’ve ever received, I wanted to share the news. I don’t do a lot of journalism these days — I contribute as a freelancer to a local community paper, the South Seattle Emerald, which received 10 of the SPJ awards this year, the most in its history. It’s more than pretty cool that in an age when the likes of the Washington Post have decimated their news and photography staff, and most local news sources have gone extinct, the Emerald keeps at it, week after week. It’s got its ear to the ground in what’s happening in the south end of my city. They do it with two full-time staff and a whole bunch of freelancers. I’m proud to be a part of their orbit, I want them to thrive. We need community voices to be heard.

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