Binh Danh’s photographs explore America’s national parks as political landscapes.

Vietnam-born, San Jose-raised and Gilroy-based photographer Binh Danh credits his love of visuals to the fact he grew up in a TV repair shop, the family business.

He was surrounded by TVs and always watching something, especially documentaries or Vietnamese movies. Danh fell in love with the process of creating photographs in high school and went on to earn an MFA with a major in studio practice from San Jose State University.

While his early projects focused on Southeast Asia and the legacy of war, particularly the Vietnamese war, his latest work involves American national parks.

“It’s an important space to be in and to think about in this country,” Danh says. “A lot of these parks are being jeopardized. Funding’s being cut, park rangers are being fired, the price for international travelers is increasing. It’s a really political space.”

Danh used the daguerreotype process, the oldest one invented, taking advantage of the plates’ reflective qualities so that the viewer also sees themselves. After being obsessed with landscapes in the Vietnamese movies he watched as a child, Danh encountered the landscape photography of Ansel Adams and the photographic group f/64 while in college. At first, he decided they did everything that was possible to do with landscape photography. Exploring the daguerreotype process on his own changed his perspective – as did the experience of leaving California and discovering landscapes in such places as Virginia.

“The light that gets recorded onto the plate is like the light that’s shining back at you when you look at the photograph,” Danh explains. “The viewer can literally see themselves in the mirror. And I hope when people see themselves, they think more about themselves and their relationship to this land and to this country.”

His photos are therefore mirror images of familiar landscapes. “It’s like when you see yourself in a photograph and you sort of don’t recognize yourself,” Danh says. “Then you realize that’s how everybody sees you [as opposed to] when you look in the mirror every morning. In my work, the image flips around, so it plays tricks on your memories of these places.”

Binh Danh: Belonging in the National Parks is on display until March 22. An artist talk at 3pm (followed by a reception at 6pm) takes place on Saturday, Feb. 14. Center for Photographic Art at Sunset Center, San Carlos and 9th, Carmel. Free. (831) 625-5181, photography.org.