Oberlin Photographer Pipo Nguyen-duy Found Dead at 64

Pipo Nguyen-duy, a photography professor at Ohio's Oberlin College and Conservatory and a Guggenheim Fellowship recipient, was found dead at 64 on Wednesday in an off-campus home. His stepwife, Tran Thi Phong, was also found fatally shot, and his son now faces a double-homicide charge.

ABC News reports that Nguyen-duy's son, Daniel Jones — formerly known as Asia Nguyen-duy — has been charged in connection with the murder of his father and stepmother. Local police discovered both victims with multiple gunshot wounds.

What happened in Oberlin?

"The male victim was discovered on the first floor of the residence, and the female victim was discovered on the second floor. Both victims suffered from multiple gunshot wounds," police said in a statement on Thursday.

Jones appeared in court on Thursday afternoon in handcuffs and ankle shackles. A judge ordered him held in jail with bail set at $3 million. Police arrested him on Wednesday, without incident, after an Oberlin resident called to report a "wet disheveled man" at her front door.

Roughly 90 minutes before the bodies were found, officers had been called to an Oberlin College campus parking lot. Firefighters were extinguishing a fire in a vehicle registered to Jones.

In court, prosecutor Zachary Simonoff said Jones had asked the resident to record a video of him to post online. "He told her that he did not want the police involved. In the video, he identifies himself as Asia Nguyen-duy, says he's escaping a cult. He also says, 'Everything I did was on my own accord and I take full responsibility,'" Simonoff said.

Simonoff said officers then went to the address and "found two people dead apparently from gunshot wounds with blood throughout the house." According to the prosecutor, Jones told officers he "killed his family" when they first spoke to him and gave them his father's address.

Police have contacted Jones's mother in Oregon, Simonoff said. She told them her son is psychotic and needs medication. A motive remains under investigation, and the weapon allegedly used has not been found.

What does this change for Oberlin?

Nguyen-duy had taught studio art and photography at Oberlin since 1998. The college now faces the loss of a faculty member who shaped a generation of photography students over nearly three decades.

"Tragedies such as this one intrude upon our lives in jarring ways. I am simply overwhelmed with sadness, and I am deeply concerned about the impact of the devastating loss of Pipo to our community," Oberlin College President Carmen Twillie Ambar said in a Wednesday statement to students and colleagues.

"Pipo was beloved. During his years at Oberlin, he touched all of us through his passion for photography. Our community will be hurting for a very long time, and when the shock of this news subsides, we will all need to process our grief. This process will sometimes be together and sometimes alone, but we will need to take the time to do so," Ambar said.

A career built on displacement and war

Nguyen-duy immigrated from Vietnam in 1975 as a political refugee. He took up photography in his late 20s and earned his MA and MFA from the University of New Mexico at Albuquerque, building an internationally exhibited career.

"In his wide-ranging body of work, Nguyen-duy considered immigration and emigration, intimacy, abandonment and decay, cultural assimilation, and the cost of war," the Guggenheim Foundation wrote in an Instagram tribute. "And he touched people all over the world with his probing, compassionate work."

In 2023, he showed at the 15th Sharjah Biennial, exhibiting photographs of schoolchildren playing in what looks like the Vietnamese countryside — some napping on felled trees, others with assault rifles tucked under their arms.

As the criminal case moves forward, Oberlin will be left to absorb the loss of an artist whose work spent decades examining precisely the kind of violence and displacement that ended his life.