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Villareal, Alexei L.

Prior to the publication of Chinatown Through a Wide Lens by local community historian Catherine Clement in 2019, the studio photography of Yucho Chow had long been removed from conversations around the history of Vancouver and those who inhabited its neighbourhoods. For years, his family portraits had been tucked away in private albums and boxes, concealing with them a multiplicity of stories about the individuals and communities who lived in the city at the time. Over a span of decades, Chow's camera had captured the lives of not only Chinese-Canadians, but as well as other immigrants and racialized minorities. Alongside ongoing efforts to preserve Vancouver's Chinatown, the diversity displayed in his body of work raises questions concerning lived histories and the visibility of everyday people in the study of local histories. Drawing from Michel Foucault's discussion of heterotopia, the functioning of space within Chow's studio establishes a "visual Chinatown," one that is heterotopian and thus frames Vancouver in an alternative historical lens. Through an intimate glimpse into the lives of five families photographed by Chow, this paper argues that the depiction of their resilience and familial memory curates an archive of the (extra)ordinary life, a documentation of cultural resistance against erasures of the past.

Text

University of British Columbia. HIST 490; University of British Columbia. Undergraduate Prize in Library Research

Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library

10.14288/1.0448942

Arts, Faculty of; History, Department of

Undergraduate

DSpace