Picturing Chinatown: Art and Orientalism in San Francisco

This is a heavy book in weight and research details. Prof Lee included many resources on old and new San Francisco Chinatown in terms of art and photography. It is beautifully edited in Chinese politics and Chinatown history involvement. He included many classic pictures and not seen paintings. It is not a coffee table book on San Francisco Chinatown. Sometimes, it is too heavy and tedious to digest the relevant materials. His chapter on Forbidden City Club in San Francisco included many items not well known as generally assumed the dancer girls were Chinese on the floor show. It also exposed the gay man as the lead man in the closet. He included many famous photographers and their works This book showed the daily life more in text than pictures. It is a good reference for Chinatown.

Anthony W. Lee's book Picturing Chinatown, Art and Orientalism in San Francisco is an accounting of the history of Chinatown between the years1850 and 1950 that uses photography and painting as its main sources. His two primary organizing motifs are "desire" and "difference." Lee characterizes desire as often times invidious and the notion of difference is how the pictures expose the needs and aspirations of their creators. He locates the intersection of these two motifs in the paintings and photographs of Arnold Genthe, Carleton Watkins, Theodore Wores, Louis Stellman, Edward Deakins, Isaiah West Tabor amongst others. One of the author's main premises and method of defending his thesis is the idea that many of the forms that are considered modernist are tied to the discourse surrounding race relations. Edward Said's notion of Orientalism (forming bodies of knowledge about the racialized other as a precursor to conquest) is one of the main theoretical tools that Lee uses to defend his argument. The structure of his argument is broken into six chapters: The Place of Chinatown, Picturesque Chinatown, Photography in the Books, Revolutionary Artists and The Forbidden City. The first chapter titled The Place of Chinatown, covers the early history of Chinatown's geography. Lee describes Chinatown as a fulcrum or crossroads between the docks that all new settlers had to come through and the San Francisco hills inhabited by non-Chinese settlers. It is significant that all of the settlers had to traverse Chinatown in order to make a place in San Francisco. The settlers, both Chinese and non-Chinese, were predominantly male. The early photographers gained employment through photographing the Chinese. However, the photographic practice was also a way for the non-Chinese to reclaim space. The photograph allowed them to reclaim space in texts and in their imaginations. Lee illustrates this process with a quote from the newspaper The Daily Alta California, "Dupont Street is one of the most desirable in the city for retail stores and family residences, and it seems a pity that so fine a street should be occupied with so much filth and nastiness..." The quote illustrates the white settler's invidious desire for Chinatown's land space and how they used the newspaper text to create racialized difference. The chapter titled Picturesque Chinatown covers the founding of the Bohemian Club in 1872. It consisted of white male artists, writers and intellectuals who would stroll through Chinatown much the same way the Parisian flaneur did in Europe. However, Lee argues that the San Francisco Bohemian was much more visually dependant than the flaneur of Paris. The way in which the San Francisco Bohemian of the 19th century experienced Chinatown was more attached to visuality than the Parisian flaneur because the flaneur spoke the language of the culture that he was viewing. However, the Bohemian was beholden to his guides to show him around and explicate what he w

Don't be misled by the choice of the title. The book is not a coffeetable-type photomontage of San Francisco's Chinatown. It is certainly replete with many photographs and illustrations from Chinatown of the 19th century and early 20th century. No doubt to some readers, these will be the main attraction. Revealing in often hazy black and white the details of a vanished and important subculture of the US. But Lee has integrated the visuals with a narrative that places the images squarely in the context of when they were taken, and of the accuracy of their representations of that culture. He analyses the photographers that took these pictures, and their motives for doing so. Several were not of Chinese ethnicity. But sought to present visuals to explain what was then a very exotic society to an average white American reader. Aside from the contemporary photos, Lee also explains the art that came out of Chinatown in those years. The artwork shown in the book tends to be quite different from the traditional Chinese calligraphy and landscape themes. Instead, there are traces of influence by the European and American art movements of the day.