Billy Dinh is an American street photographer who turns everyday moments into cinematic images built on dramatic light and shadow.,Born and raised in Philadelphia, Dinh is based in Brooklyn and worked as an illustrator, including for Marvel Comics, before a break-in that stole his camera and laptop pushed him toward photography.,
His photography draws on the work of street photographers Saul Leiter and Harry Gruyaert, travel photographers Steve McCurry and Michael Yamashita, and the realist paintings of Edward Hopper. He has photographed in cities across India, Ethiopia and Vietnam as well as in New York, drawn to what he calls “busier and more hectic” urban centres. A photograph he took in Kolkata won the 2023 People Photography Award from The Independent Photographer, judged by Michael Yamashita, whom Dinh has described as an inspiration as “a fellow Asian-American photographer”.
In May 2022 a photograph of rush hour in Taiwan by Dinh appeared in “The Gold Standard”, an NFT exhibition featuring ten Asian American artists that SuperRare organized for AAPI Heritage Month, curated by Drue Kataoka.His photographs have also been shown at SuperRare's physical gallery in New York in 2021 and 2022, and at Sotheby's in Hong Kong in 2023.In New York, Dinh has documented the city's street chess culture in a photo series titled Every Move Counts, shot with the Leica Q3 and Q3 43, drawing a parallel between chess and the observational instincts of street photography.
In 2024 his photograph Our Everyday was included in “Street Life”, a group exhibition of street and documentary photography co-curated by Framelines and David Hill Gallery in London.,
