While pursuing her architecture degree, Faith Nguyen has built a career in concert photography that has taken her across the country and backstage with some of the biggest artists.
Faith Nguyen lives a double life.
By day, Nguyen, an architecture student at Northeastern University, is another 9-to-5 professional, working for Boston-based design firm MDS/Miller Dyer Spears Architects for her co-op. But by night, she is out in clubs and venues across the city, snapping shots of some of the biggest names in music.
Over the course of four years as a freelance concert photographer, Nguyen has worked hard to build a career out of her lifelong passion for live music. It has paid off.
She’s photographed the likes of SZA, Megan Thee Stallion, Chappell Roan and Kendrick Lamar. She’s grabbed shots at the Newport Folk Festival. She was named Photographer of the Year in 2023 by the Boston Music Awards. Next, she’s being flown out for Stagecoach, California’s country music festival.
Living her dual life isn’t easy. Classes, co-ops and late-night concerts are a lot for anyone to handle. For Nguyen, each part of her life is fuel for the other.
“Sometimes I’ll be at the [architecture] studio in Ruggles, I’ll leave for a couple hours, go shoot a show and come back and my friends will be like, ‘Where’d you go?’” Nguyen says. “It’s been an interesting thing to balance, but I don’t see one pursuit or the other really fully needing to take the driver’s seat, especially at this point in my life.”
When Nguyen arrived at Northeastern in 2021 from rural Northern Virginia, the idea that she would be standing 10 feet away from SZA at TD Garden was just a dream. She had some basic photography skills she’d picked up from working at a wedding venue but not much else.
Fortunately, early on, she found an entire community of students with a passion for music in Tastemakers Magazine, Northeastern’s student-run music publication.
“When I came to Northeastern and I realized that there were clubs on campus that were doing that, I was shocked,” Nguyen says. “I was like, ‘You guys don’t know how exciting this is. This is my dream.’ I have such a clear memory of being at Fall Fest as a freshman and finding the Tastemakers table and just being like, ‘This is my thing.’ … I definitely feel like I ended up exactly where I needed to be.”
Through Tastemakers, she found mentors, both students and other Boston-area photographers, who helped her hone her craft. She quickly learned to embrace the challenges inherent to the gig but also the anonymity it afforded her.
Growing up, she avoided the limelight. Photography gave her the chance to escape it.
“Now that I’ve grown as a professional and as an artist, I feel more comfortable taking ownership over my work and inserting myself into my work in ways that I wasn’t originally,” Nguyen says.
For Nguyen, photographing the biggest artists on the biggest stages means capturing images that “are larger than life but still true to life.”
“I think a lot about trying to tell a very complete story, and the big flashy moments on stage are an exciting but incomplete story,” Nguyen says. “It all comes down to little moments at the end of the day.”
Nguyen frames artists like the idols they are, but her lens also finds time for a singer’s high heels, a screaming fan or a piece of jewelry on a backup dancer, the details that stand out because they don’t stand out.
That’s where the two sides of her life overlap: Her architecture work is very influenced by the “people-focused” approach she takes with her photography. Architecture is a way to create “moments of interaction” between people; photography is a way to capture them.
The life of a freelance concert photographer isn’t always glamorous. She supports her music industry dreams by taking on commercial work –– weddings and graduation photo shoots –– because “the work that is making me money and the work that is exciting to me … never want to be the same.”
At the same time, the gig also has its moments.
“I was backstage, and Twenty One Pilots walked past me,” Nguyen recalls of Jingle Ball 2024. “Middle school me was just entirely freaked out by this. I never thought I’d be in the same room as them. It’s really crazy being in these spaces, and I try my best to keep as professional as possible while also inside being like, ‘Oh my god!’”
Those moments come more frequently now, but “it’s taken me four years to get to this point, where I have enough connections and enough of a portfolio and experience and confidence in what I do and how I do it,” she adds..
She still doesn’t feel like she’s “made it”; ironically, she admits to having “a hard time taking in the moment.” Plus she still has a dream: She hopes to go out on tour with an artist as their dedicated photographer. But Nguyen also understands that she has more than just her dream to think about now.
This year Nguyen is Tastemakers’ photo director, running a team of about 50 students. It’s terrifying. Nguyen admits she still doesn’t feel like she has it all figured out, but she’s figured out “enough to share my experiences and offer advice” to the next group of dreamers.
“I had such a full circle moment at Fall Fest this year where I was standing behind the table giving the same shpiel that someone was giving me my freshman year,” Nguyen says.
Cody Mello-Klein is a Northeastern Global News reporter. Email him at c.mello-klein@northeastern.edu. Follow him on X/Twitter @Proelectioneer.