Photograph by Bud Glick

Image Title: Club Lunch, 2 East Broadway

Dimensions: 17 1/4 x 22"

Medium: Archival Pigment Print on Baryta Paper

Year Created: 1983

Signed on verso

Image Description:

This photograph is from my project, which was exhibited (with the title Interior Lives: Photographs of Chinese Americans in the 1980s) at the Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA), Oct. 18, 2018 - March 31, 2019.

From 1981 to 1984 I worked on a photography project in New York Chinatown as part of the New York Chinatown History Project which later became MOCA. An older, primarily male community (due to racist immigration laws, such as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882) was being replaced by a rapidly expanding new influx of immigration of young families.

When I began this project, I was an outsider. As a documentary photographer my role was to keep my eyes open, learn as much as I could, make connections, and follow wherever they took me. Only with this foundation of connection could I move forward and communicate anything meaningful.

The connections that I made in the early 1980s have endured, compelling my return to these photographs, and have been enriched by recent oral history interviews with those I photographed, their children and relatives.

This work is particularly relevant now when, as an echo of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, our government's policies have normalized xenophobia and racism, spreading lies and fears about immigrants. The same, racist, anti-immigrant politics that led to Exclusion are alive and well in our current, toxic times.

Photographer's Bio:

Originally from the midwest, Bud Glick is a commercial, documentary and editorial photographer in the New York Metro area. Since the early 1980s he has worked for a variety of clients and publications. He is currently working on a book of the Chinatown photos combined with oral histories of those he photographed, their children and grandchildren.

http://budglickphoto.com/new-york-chinatown/