The Visual Review
In the dialogue around race and social justice, Asian Americans are often forgotten and ignored. They are treated similarly to how they are treated in society, invisible and touted as the “model minority.” Similarly, they are not shown as often in news media as are other groups. Several documentary photographers and photojournalists have recently explored Asian Americans and their dynamic relationships to identity. Some images are provocative portraits in sunlight with soft eyes beaming and a sense of self-awareness. Others are family-oriented moments of daily life. Together, these photographers and projects convey a more complete essence of who we are as Asian Americans and how we connect to the world around us.
“The Farewell,” a 2019 film directed by Lulu Wang, is one of a few works that take on the complicated workings of Asian American families dealing with balancing dual identities. Along with Crazy Rich Asians, the film is one of the first Hollywood feature films to have an all-Asian cast. It is a semi-autobiographical drama about a family’s choice not to tell their grandmother she is dying. Billi, a young Chinese American woman, returns to China to see her grandmother one last time under the false pretense of a wedding. Billi is conflicted by the guilt of not telling her grandmother that she is dying due to lung cancer. The family conceals their emotions as best they can in front of their “Nai Nai,” but often breaks their calm and collected character behind her back. Other conflicts in the film include tensions around an ongoing debate on which country is better, the United States or China. This argument leads to the larger theme of being Chinese American, which is often shown in scenes that are circular in framing and blocking.
The family’s two sons live away from their mother in China, one in America and the other in Japan. The brother living in Japan is still considered Eastern by his family, while the son living in New York is seen at American or Western. During a pre-wedding dinner there is a discussion about whether America is better than China. It’s filmed around a circular table, a staple in any Chinese banquet hall. The camera frame is just wide enough for the viewer to want more, just like leaning in to reach for the last piece of roast duck. Dishes spin on a lazy Susan as the camera cuts back and forth during a heated exchange. Billi is caught in-between the conversations between her mom and aunt, East and West, American and Chinese. It’s not that one is better than the other, “they’re just different,” she says.
Much of the film is shot at a medium close-up distance, shrinking the on-screen space and creating intimacy; an insider’s view of the family’s secrets. In one scene, the family visits a cemetery honoring their grandfather. The camera is static on a tripod and viewing the family from the profile. The family is facing left on the screen, toward the tombstone. The tight framing of the camera makes it so that when they bow they are out of frame. Nai Nai leads a ceremony honoring her husband and charges everyone to bow in respect. The camera stays stationary allowing the family to move like birds pecking constantly. As Nai Nai continues to instruct the next steps of the ceremony the family behind her knows that her death may be coming soon.
Tyler Graef is a staff photographer at the Southeast Missourian, a small local paper in Cape Girardeau, Missouri. In July 2019, Graef photographed a group of African-American teens who are part of the Honorable Young Men Club, a nonprofit located in Cape Girardeau, Mo., that aims to mentor young men to learn, “life skills needed in life to handle emotions, work and finding balance among relationships.” The teenagers were taken on a weekend trip to the woods with the help of guides from the Missouri Department of Conservation. Greaf documents joy, mentorship, and embrace, something that isn’t always shown in the African American community. Graef is able to capture scenes of young men of color lifting up the next generation. One prime example of this is a photo of Kwelu Arkoful teaching a teenager how to shoot a bow-and-arrow. With the boys focused on the bow on camera right, Arkoful reaches out with his right arm and shows them how to grip the string. He places two fingers around the arrow to show them the grip. Behind Arkoful, there are several other boys who are watching attentively toward the teaching, looking eager to try their hand at archery.
The full story Graef shares is in black and white, a technique often used to focus on textures and layers in a photo. Greaf’s photos are of several young boys engaging in outside activities such as fishing and archery. Thanks to the closeness of Graef’s lens, we can see the children’s emotions and curiosity in their eyes. One striking image is of a young boy, Derrick Clark, standing shirtless with a handkerchief around his neck. As a fishing pole sits planted in the ground with its line in the water, Clark stares at something out of frame. The setting sun is just adjacent his head and shines into the camera, creating a soft, glowing flare that resembles a halo around the boy. The photograph feels angelic. You can tell the boy is comfortable with Graef being around him due to the proximity of the frame. It’s close.
Another impactful photo in Graef’s “A Day in the Woods” is of three boys, Lemuel Gilbert, Bradford Woods, and Kazyrion Murray, running through a shallow body of water. The boys are in a line with almost equal distance between them. A wide composition, the boys’ full bodies are in the frame, allowing us to see their strides toward the camera. Their eyes are fixated on the waters below, searching, as Greaf writes in his caption, “for fish and crawdads.” The boys are framed by a darkened forest with tree branches hanging over them. They look comfortable is a place that’s so new to them. The photo is composed in the classic “rule of thirds,” a composition technique first coined by early painters in the 18th century that breaks an image into three equal parts like a grid. The technique emphasizes balance in the frame where gridlines intersect. In Graef’s photo, the three boys’ eyes are all on the same level, while their feet are in another. They line up just far enough away to fill the left column, center, and right column of the image. Looking into composition further, the rule of thirds also refers to the technique of layers. Building layers in a photo will help viewers focus on the subject by building foreground, middle ground, and background. Greaf has captured the foreground of the moving water, the middle ground of the boys, and the background of the wooded setting. Greaf also adds another background element of another unidentified boy standing in the water throwing something in the distance.
Rosie Matheson’s “Boys” is a collection of portraits photographed primarily in the United Kingdom. As a film photographer Matheson uses Kodak Portra, a color film popular among portrait photographers for its soft color palette and skin tones. In a 2018 interview with NegativeFeedback, a YouTube channel centered around film photography, Matheson, in her twenties, explains that the series was started to open up a dialogue about masculinity and the role of the muse because of the way she approaches strangers and friends to pose for her. Matheson started the project by finding teenagers and young men alone, or in a group, in the street and asking them if they would be interested in being photographed. She finds them wherever she can such as, skateparks, concerts, and libraries.
One of Matheson’s most famous portraits is of Elliot Brown. In a vertical photo, Brown has his eyes closed, while facing the camera. The photo is a medium closeup and is cut off at his chest. He’s centered in the frame, in focus while the rest of the photo is not. His freckled face pulls us in as the rest of the image is smooth. To achieve this smooth effect, Matheson works with a Mamiya RZ67 medium format film camera. By using a medium format camera, Matheson is able to achieve a very shallow depth of field, often with extreme bokeh – a translation from the Japanese word boke, or blur, used to describe the out-of-focus parts of an image – in the background, while the tack-sharp focus catches the subject’s eyes.
In Brown’s photo, Matheson includes a film border on one side of the photo. Usually a result of a scanning error, Matheson embraces it as an aesthetic choice. (Many photographers from the 1980s and 2000’s chose to use the film border as way to visually contain the subject.) Film photography has a lot of potential to go wrong. If the exposure is off, it may cause color changes. If the film is taken too early or too late out of the development bath, it can change the result as well. In this regard, film photography is science. Allowing mistakes to be included is a beautiful analogy for the masculine façade that boys stereotypically put up. “Boys don’t cry” is a phrase that is said to us when we’re faced with a difficult situation. Many put up walls to prevent ourselves from showing weakness like emotions and communication. In reality, those walls break us down. Matheson is able to capture the tender side of boys with her portraits.
Erika and Lanny Mann are mainly wedding photographers based in Alberta, Canada. But between weddings and engagements, the Manns, who work as Two Mann Studios, travel the world with their two children. The Manns are masters of light, both artificial and natural. The Manns are able to capture silhouettes and shadows in ways that almost don’t exist in the real world. They are painterly. One example of this feature is a photo of their children, Madelyn and Timmy, silhouetted and running down a sand dune in India. The kids are in stride and mid-air, leaping downhill. There is some sand flying under one of the kid’s feet, providing a sense of motion to the photo. The children’s full bodies are shown in the photo as they leap downward, while a building’s triangular roof is in the background. The colors of the sunset evolve from the orange to blue in the background. The light looks as if it’s the last glowing bit of the day. This photo screams, “Five more minutes!” the phrase we all said to our parents when asking for a few extra moments of fun.
What works for the Manns in their personal, documentary work, and their wedding work, is the natural intimacy seen in their images. There is quality of lack of awareness and proximity that allows for viewers to connect with the curiosity within the children. On their blog, the Manns also include the children’s diaries, which has drawings and short paragraphs of what they did. Paired with intimate family photographs, we get a sense of how this family is in real life. Visually, the Manns are strong with reflections, something that can be a cliché, but when used well, can be impactful, especially in an examination of self-identity.
“Being a Boy,” a Washington Post investigative project, chronicles the daily lives of several boys, at different ages, in 2018 and powerfully captures what it’s like to grow up male in a world where power dynamics are evolving. Calla Kessler, the Washington Posts’ then-photo intern, was tapped to photograph the whole series, providing a consistent visual theme to the three stories that make up the project. As a young twenty-something woman, Kessler was able to build rapport with the young subjects and make them feel comfortable around her.
The series opens with a photo of Elliot Campbell, the poster for “Boyhood,” the 2014 film directed by Richard Linklater. He is laying on his back on a maroon and orange carpet, with his eyes staring at the ceiling. In a grey hoodie, Campbell has his arms spread out, almost in a snow angel pose. The photo is framed so that the composition is of only his torso. There is window light spilling in from the top left of the photo, where his feet would be if you could see them. Campbell lies on the maroon section of the carpet. There is a large circular pattern on the rug that moves from red fabric to orange, then grey, and maroon. In his hand, Campbell is holding a soft toy with a paw print on the top of it. His hand is a little out of focus due to his motion while Kessler slowed her shutter speed to allow more light to come into the camera. The photograph is atmospheric with the soft light and medium-tight framing and allows us to enter Campbell’s own world by just focusing on just him.
Hanna Yoon is a Korean Canadian photographer based in Philadelphia. Her project “Hyphenated” was published on NPR on April 28, 2019. Yoon’s influence for the project was a search for finding others like her: "Since I grew up in a small city with 90 percent of the population being white, I found myself wanting to blend in," Yoon says. "Naturally, I ended up being the token Asian in a lot of my social groups and I enjoyed the attention. I didn't realize I was being tokenized and was just happy to be acknowledged.”
“Hyphenated” is a series of portraits asking subjects to share what it means to be Korean, if they identity with being Korean at all. For Yoon, the internal debate turns into an outward fight of defending that she is Canadian. That fight is more difficult than it seems because Canadian tends to mean “white.” For Yoon’s work, the subjects are placed in nondescript environments: outside, a restaurant, a room. What these spaces are missing is a place of belonging for the subjects; the subjects fit into the space, not the other way around. Not belonging has been a common experience for many Asians due to the “model minority” theory. Due to this, Asians are often overlooked in race relation discussions. Similarly, Yoon is able to capture portraits of people who feel very displaced in their identity and feel overlooked.
One portrait in the series is of Lauren McCullough, a Korean American adoptee who grew up in Oregon and now lives in Seoul. Her shirt is yellow, a color commonly associated with Asian people, and she is boxed in by the buildings around her. The portrait is framed from her abdomen up, a compositional technique that provides space around a subject’s head and face. We get a sense of breath from this crop, but about a third in from camera-left, there is wall. McCullough has her hand on the wall, which has Korean writing on it, refencing her reach toward Korean-ness.
In a photo by Kyle Myles, a Baltimore-based documentary photographer, his younger brother kneels on a carpenter’s table in what looks to be a garage. And older gentleman, presumably his father, is in the background, slightly out of focus. From a technical standpoint, it looks to be a low-light situation. From an artistic standpoint, it symbolizes generations and remembrance. Focused in their work, each man hold a power sander. They press it against different objects, the brother sanding a chair and the father sanding a bicycle frame. Myles primarily photographs on black and white film, mostly a film stock called Ilford HP5. The film, HP5, is a 400-speed film, which makes it an ideal, all-around film. It’s usually a flat film, meaning there is low contrast (the ratio of highlights to shadows) in the photograph. The subjects create a ‘W” with their bodies and the bike frame that the father is working on, forcing our eyes upward, while their eyes look down. His brother is leaning slightly toward the camera and camera-left, while the father is learning the opposite direction. They are both wearing black hoodies and the bike frame is black, too. There is a seamless connection between the two of them. Myles chose to use a black border on his image, the same technique done by Matheson. By choosing to use the black border, the viewer is prohibited from imagining what’s outside the line, keeping attention on the two subjects.
Eslah Attar is the daughter of Syrian refugees and the middle sister to two brothers and a sister. Her portfolio has the feeling of being misplaced in a comfortable place. Attar’s personal project, “‘Lawn Oyounak’: The Color of His Eyes,” is an ongoing documentary photo essay of her brother, Mo. It was featured last year at Photoville, an annual photo festival in New York City. There is a deep connection between the two, who talk on a weekly basis, either via text or FaceTime. Attar writes on her website:
… As an 11-year-old, he is caught between different worlds and different dreams. He is the youngest in our large family, constantly looking for a role that’s more than the littlest one in the room. He lives in the same house as I did, in a way so uniquely his own, and I’m inspired by his way of seeing our home.
He’ll spend hours on the trampoline and then immediately challenge himself to a game of chess. He navigates the labels that society assigns him and follows his independent spirit to wherever curiosity may lead him.
Mo is constantly changing.
The lede image above the text is of Mo in an almost-child’s pose. He is hunched over with a gentle window light sprinkling onto his bare back. It’s the kind of light that make one want to stay in bed with no plans. Looking at the light, we can feel the motion of the curtains that are diffusing the light. We all know the one corner in our parents’ home where the light does this. You can feel it as you put your hand through its beam. And for Mo, it feels like it’s a place he goes to often. The photo has an inviting and warm mood. Mo’s expression is one of longing and contemplation; Attar writes that Mo’s role is “more than the littlest one in the room,” and in this photo, we feel that he is starting to carve out his own identity.
Andrew Mangum is a Baltimore-based photographer known for his portraiture. Some of his most inspiring work is his personal photographs of his children. Mangum’s portraits are soft. His light, the eyes, and the atmosphere, give the images a certain breath that is so refreshing. Capturing imagery of children can be challenging, but for Mangum, it feels so natural. Mangum recently cleared his Instagram page to have a fresh look. The first image of his feed is of his son, Fox, laying his head on a table. In black and white, the image flirts between the highlights and shadows, creating a warm tone. It feels warm in nature too, with Fox’s eyes directly piercing Mangum’s lens. His cheek, on the table, is slightly ajar, meaning he must’ve moved during the initial set-up. Can’t you hear it, “Dad, what is taking so long?” He might not have said it, but his facial expression portrays it. The camera microscopically hovers above Fox, just enough that his eyes look up at it. It’s what we want out children to do, right? To look up at us, even if it’s just for a little bit. Magnum’s portraits feel like a tide, floating between high and low.
Shuran Huang’s “Strands of Love” is so much more than documentation of a barbershop in Syracuse, but a view into a family’s life. Published on NPR on March 15, 2019. Huang’s images show us what life is like for the Collins family in upstate New York. They’ve owned the barbershop for four years. Huang primarily follows the patriarch of the family, Charleston Collins. He took over the shop in 2014 when his father passed away and is grooming his sons and grandsons for when he does.
Huang’s camera allows us to experience the Collins’ spaces. We see their walls filled with family photographs and memorabilia like trophies and heirlooms. We see their barbershop, with its tiled floor and classic post of haircut styles. We even see their church shining an array of colors on them during a Sunday service thanks to the rainbow-like stained-glass windows. According to the NPR piece, Huang was so much affected by discussions with the Collins that she converted to Christianity. In one photo, Huang captures Charleston at a men’s only Sunday school. The photo is of his hands, clasped over a large, thick bible with “pray” written in big bubble letters along the side of the pages. Different passages from Romans are listed next to “pray” in a purple marker. Wearing a blazer and bracelet, Charleston holds a black pencil with a blue rubber grip. His hands rest calmly on the bible, which is opened to Philippians 4:4. One passage on the page is boxed, while other words and phrases are underlined.
Tones of blue integrate the essay. It’s the color of the floor in barbershop’s entrance, Charleston’s wife Mary’s headwrap, the pencil he uses to underline verses in his bible, the little league team’s jersey, and the gloves that hold a newborn baby. Huang’s use of blue hues bring us into the intimate moments of this family.
Family documentary photography is challenging. You do not need the trust of just need one person, you need it from the whole unit. You are entering a family’s private home and capturing their private moments. In “The Farewell,” the grandmother constantly talks about appearances like the appearance of being cheap or sick, when, in fact, she is sick. Appearance in Asian culture is everything. To capture families in their truest form will be difficult but having inspirations and influence like these are already helping shape the Asian American narrative.