7.75 × 9.5 inches, 124 pages, hard cover
ISBN 978-1-941753-83-5

Design by IN-FO.CO
Published by Inventory Press, San José Museum of Art, & Kohler Arts Center

Available for Pre-order
Shipping November 2025

Featuring selections from six major series to date as well as new work made in Laos, The Imaginative Landscape traces Pao Houa Her's ever-deepening exploration into concepts of home and belonging. In the exhibition and catalogue, she brings together formal and vernacular photographic languages, working in black-and-white and color photography that takes the form of lightboxes, wheat-pasted images, and video, in addition to traditionally framed images. Rooted in the experience of her HMong community, an ethnic group indigenous to Laos, and shaped by family lore passed down by her elders, Her investigates the potential of photography to create nonlinear narratives, exploring construction in both physical form and metaphor.

Accompanied by essays on the work by co-curator Lauren Dickens and Alexander Supartono, and an interview with the artist by co-curator ​​Jodi Throckmorton, this catalogue explores Her’s work in genres of portraiture, landscape, still life and vernacular, as she photographs herself and those people and places around her through the tinted lens of diasporic longing, where Minnesota and California become stand-ins for Laos, plastic florals replace living tropics, ersatz and real meld together.