writingrefa.blogg.se

• Dim sum chinatown nyc gothamist professional#

But the nostalgia kindled by Bocian's black and white photos of old storefronts, like that of Hop Shing, a coffee shop and dim sum restaurant known for its pork and coconut buns, has only intensified in light of COVID. Old photo tours of New York City are well-mined territory. From the earliest weeks of the coronavirus outbreak, Chinatown suffered greatly, initially as the target of racially motivated fears about the virus and later because of restrictions that hobbled restaurants and thwarted tourists. Some of the photos had been featured by MOCA over the years, but hoping to bring the photos to a wider audience, museum officials pitched the idea of a joint exhibit.Īlthough planned prior to the pandemic, the exhibit has landed at a precipitous moment for Chinatown and Chinese New Yorkers.

Through his research, Chu learned that Bocian had grown up in Brooklyn as the youngest of six in a family of Eastern European Jewish immigrants. The exhibit, titled "An Unlikely Photojournalist: Emile Bocian in Chinatown" represents a collaboration between MOCA and the Center for Jewish History. In a fortunate turn of events, a portion of the collection was put on virtual display last month. After his death, the story goes, a friend took his photos from his apartment and donated them to MOCA, where they had languished in boxes for years. Although he did not speak Chinese, he earned a job freelancing for the China Post, a now defunct Chinese-language daily newspaper based in New York City.Ī lifelong bachelor, he died at age 78 in 1990. Listen to Elizabeth Kim's report on WNYC:īocian, a public relations expert and photo enthusiast, moved to Chinatown during the latter part of his life. Relying on the personal letters he found, Chu made cold calls and wrote letters and eventually connected with the relatives of Emile Bocian, the photographer. It is the largest photo collection MOCA owns.

Dim sum chinatown nyc gothamist professional#

The photos were not the work of a professional photographer, but by their sheer volume suggested a dedicated and entrenched documentarian.Īll told, there were over 50,000 photos in all, dating from between 19. But there were also casual shots of everyday life-teenage girls preening on a building stoop, seniors eating at a communal kitchen, a tai chi group, young men casually posing against a row of bikes. Some were of popular Chinatown spectacles like holiday parades and street festivals, and dignitaries and celebrities ranging from Ali to Mayor Ed Koch to Big Bird. The more he looked, the more the snapshots intrigued him. To see Muhammad Ali in a Chinese American archive," recalled Chu, who now works as an assistant director at MOCA. "It was like one of these things I never expected. Lee, the former president of the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association.

The museum, based in Chinatown and known as MOCA, had recently undergone an archival effort, and Chu was curious about some of the items.Ī boxing fan, he initially fixated on a 1974 photo of Muhammad Ali taken with a man later identified as M.B.

In 2014, Kevin Chu was going through the archives of the Museum of Chinese in America when he came upon boxes of curled-up black and white photos of Chinese New Yorkers, many of them taken in Chinatown.