Codex: Reading with Care: Photography and Anti- Asian Violence

since spring 2020, approximately sixty- six hundred anti- Asian racist incidents have been reported, according to a 2021 report from Stop AAPI Hate. Included in these numerical statistics are incidents of verbal abuse, bullying, and vandalism, including threats to “kill all Chinese people” spray-painted on the walls of mom-and-pop stores and restaurants. Supplementing these alarming statistics and reports of anti- Asian violence is the proliferation of images—photographs taken by professional photographers, bystanders, and the victims themselves— reproduced digitally and in print as photojournalism, documentary photography, studio and passport portraits of the victims, family and vacation snapshots, and selfies. Supplementing these photographs are a number of viral videos— a Filipina woman being kicked in the head, a Chinese woman shoved to the ground in front of a bakery— that have served as an alert, a warning that puts all of “us” on notice to put our guard up. Viewing the ceaseless image stream of crime scenes, victim mugshots, and portraits of grief risks succumbing to what Sianne Ngai (2007) conceives as “stuplimity,” a feeling of shock and anomie.

Yet over the last year, the images also seem to register something else: in the aftermath of the 2021 Atlanta spa shootings, Asian Americans took to the streets to express their outrage. United by fear and anger, large crowds of Asian Americans gathered across the country, prepared with their signage and messages to the world. Embedded in photographic coverage of protests and vigils were neatly hand- painted banners pointing out the roots of anti- Asian violence— white supremacy, racial capitalism, and Orientalism— that came in the form of a series of negations: “not your model minority,” “I am not a virus,” “not your China doll.”¹ The global coverage and large turnout of protestors that cut across race and class attracted the attention of the news media in unprecedented ways that seemed finally to make legible Asian Americans as humans and legitimize their status as Americans (Yam 2021).

Figure 1.

Protest against anti- Asian violence and white supremacy outside City Hall, New York City, March 26, 2021. Credit: STFR/STAR MAX/IPx via AP Photo.

When the news media covered these acts of violence and the protests that emerged in their aftermath, without any analyses of the specific structural conditions that perpetuate the harassment and oppression of Asian Americans, photographs of the protests threatened to look over-determined, even redundant, especially in light of our familiarity with the global protests of Black Lives Matter that took place in summer 2020. Despite clear signage demanding direct action to “Stop the Violence” and “Teach Asian American History,” the photographs appear muted, presenting the outburst of Asian American violence as recent and exceptional. Absent in the mainstream press were images of cross- racial solidarity, absent was past media coverage of the brutal murder of Vincent Chin in Detroit in 1982 and the mass shooting of five Cambodian and Vietnamese children in Stockton, California, in 1989 that highlight how anti– Asian American violence is not new but systemic.

As curators and as critics, we bring to this heterogeneous photographic archive of anti- Asian violence our mutual interests in photography and representation, affect and aesthetics. The two of us turn toward what we see as a public exhibition of anti- Asian violence to ask: What does the photograph make visible and obscure? How can we create ways of reading the photograph as an archive of violence that moves beyond tropes of Asian American visibility and invisibility? The images that constitute this archive depict incidents of violence against Asian Americans but also mourn those who have been brutally attacked and murdered. It includes photographs of mass gatherings of Asian Americans amid flowers, candles, handheld posters, and banners; it also includes video stills of Asian immigrants violently targeted on the street, in a subway car, and in their businesses. The accumulation of this archive tells us something we already know— that racialized bodies are targets of violence— but we continue to look at it obsessively, as if...