Picturing Chinatown: Art and Orientalism in San Francisco (review)

In Picturing Chinatown, Anthony Lee renders deep the surface of the photographic and painted picture plane. Six chapters weave imagery along the streets and the alleys of San Francisco's Chinatown, resulting in a remarkable recasting of a diverse corpus of historical photography, prints, paintings and entertainment. As he states in the introduction, Lee's objective is to trace Chinatown's "history of imaginings" from 1850 to 1950, a period which witnessed significant shifts in the status of Chinese American citizenship. (7) While Lee himself identifies his chapters as "case studies, each devoted to the works of particular artists," it is clear that the modalities of each of these focused parts far surpass a single-faceted art historical survey.

Lee sets the stage for his inquiry by examining the earliest photographs of Chinatown, dating from the 1850s and the 1860s. He groups early views, which echo the format and the approach of contemporary regional survey photography, with a series of personal posed portraits of the Chinese population, thereby laying the groundwork for understanding the representation of Chinatown as a visual negotiation between an urban landscape and the racialized body. This first chapter introduces Lee's method, which he carries through the entire volume in a consistent fashion. He starts with a series of images to open up the realm of inquiry. Of these images, one or more receive a rigorous visual analysis of form, line, composition, and sometimes color. Then, in each case, he deftly demonstrates how imagery, at each juncture in Chinatown's history, was tied up with current economic and political issues that were being vetted in the public sphere. He also suggests, from this very first section, that the image, in this case the photograph, served as one of the landscapes upon which Chinese difference was formulated and reified, through representations of the urban terrain of the city and its inhabitants.

In the second chapter, Lee establishes Chinatown as the arena for the Bohemian flaneur who was preoccupied with the observation and the recording of his urban jaunts. Pivoting on the notion of the picturesque, Lee identifies how the dialectics of Bohemian viewing hinged on the production of a dissimilar Chinese urban landscape. As a contemporary strand, Lee describes how the white working class impulses of the 1870s and 1880s allowed for a parallel, albeit exaggerated construction of the Chinese laborer as the site of opposition, difference, and exclusion. These two narratives serve as a composite example of the ways in which the non-Chinese population of San Francisco used Chinatown as a locus for the construction of their own class and social identities.

Chapters 3 and 4 must be considered in concert, as they both deal with the large number of black and white photographs of the city that date from the last decade of the nineteenth century through the first decade of the twentieth century. Lee's meticulous archival work allows for a re-contextualization of the known range of photographs of Chinatown, grouping together the best-known work of Arnold Genthe with images that are relatively obscure and even anonymous. In Chapter 3, Lee employs an art historical language of visual analysis — pictorialism — to grapple with the range of representational responses that appear within the spectrum of these photographs. In Chapter 4, Lee moves to consider the changes that occurred in the picturing of Chinatown after the great fire of 1906 that destroyed much of its existing form. He moves his focus away from the single images that dominated the first segments of the volume, and turns to photographs that were grouped for publication and to a hotly debated installation of a fabricated Chinese subculture at the 1915 Panama Pacific International Exposition. He considers this wider corpus of media at a moment when Chinatown was being transformed into a tourist destination and Chinese national identity was being broadly...