Oberlin College photography professor Pipo Nguyen-duy and his wife shot dead in Ohio

A 64-year-old professor of photography at Oberlin College and his 56-year-old wife have been shot dead in Ohio.

According to documents of the Oberlin Municipal Court, the investigation has charged the photographer's 31-year-old child from a previous marriage, Asia Nguyen-duy (born Daniel Jones), with the murder of Pipo Nguyen-duy and Tran Thi Phong. As to the gender of this child, matters are not entirely clear, though Daniel would seem to be a male name. The charges include six counts of murder, one count of tampering with evidence and four counts of felonious assault.

Nguyen-duy was born in 1962 in Hue, the former imperial capital of Vietnam. His childhood was spent thirty kilometres from the demilitarised zone, and he recalled hearing gunfire every day. In 1975 he arrived in the United States as a political refugee. He took up photography in New York, where he worked as a barman and then as the manager of a nightclub. He later took a degree at the University of New Mexico. In 2011 the Guggenheim Foundation awarded him a fellowship in photography, and in 2012, while working as a Guggenheim fellow on a series of portraits of Vietnamese who had lost limbs in the war, he began the project “(My) East of Eden”.

The photographer himself wrote that he began his life in the United States in 1975 as a Vietnamese refugee, and that cultural identity and authenticity therefore became the central themes of his work. His works are held by museums and private collections in the United States, Europe and Asia.

The President of Oberlin College, Carmen Twillie Ambar, stated that she was deeply troubled by the consequences of this loss for the college community. In her words, everyone loved Pipo, and over his years at Oberlin he touched everyone with his passion for photography.