"The New Toy"

In 1895, a young German intellectual named Arnold Genthe arrived in San Francisco and became fascinated by the city’s Chinatown, which was then referred to as “Tang Ren Bu” (meaning “port of the Tang people”). He produced around 200 images of Chinatown before going on to a career as a highly successful portrait photographer. Genthe’s photographs remain a rare collection of moments that capture the rich street life of Old Chinatown, before it was leveled by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. His process of emphasis and omission, however, proved highly problematic over time. While Genthe claimed insider status among Chinese Americans, his contact with the community extended to tourist hot spots, and he often hid himself to photograph suspicious residents with his “candid camera.” He intentionally mislabeled some images to make their content more palatable to his white American patrons; for example, one such photograph of vendors selling offal on a street cart was titled “The Fish Monger.” While Chinatown’s residents were predominantly adult men, two-thirds of his photographs depict children (who were easier to photograph and more appealing to his patrons), and over half of his images depict residents in ornate holiday dress (which suggested this was daily clothing). Most shockingly, Genthe severely cropped and retouched his images, often scratching out English signs and white bystanders, in order to convey a more exotic representation of Chinatown. Through their detail and misrepresentation, Genthe’s photographs provide us a glimpse of the vibrance of a lost neighborhood and the stereotypes of his time.