Oceanside's Hill Street Country Club art space opens a new show this weekend, a retrospective of photographer Johnny Nguyen's work. The exhibition, "Normalize Radical," chronicles the decade Nguyen spent photographing street activism and counterculture movements in San Diego, beginning with the Occupy movement and leading right up until this summer's protests against police brutality and racial injustice.
A photograph taken during the La Mesa protest on May 30, 2020 is part of Nguyen's show at Hill Street Country Club.
Years ago, when he was laid off from an engineering job, he enrolled in classes at Palomar College and worked on the campus newspaper. For a while, Nguyen thought he may go into journalism, but he ultimately didn't see a future there, and turned back to engineering — his day job now is a civil engineer — and he returned to shooting pictures just for himself.
"A lot of my work is that — activism, protest work," Nguyen said. "I've shot for the school newspaper, so my work started off as photojournalism — taking a photo for the paper, working with the writer to make sure I get the right picture to represent their story," he said.