New York's Chinatown in the Early 1980s

Alan Taylor
December 4, 2014
22 Photos
In Focus

From 1981 to 1984, photographer Bud Glick worked on a photography project as part of the New York Chinatown History Project, now the Museum of Chinese in America. An older Chinatown generation was being replaced by a rapidly expanding new influx of immigrants. His goal was to document the transformation from an aging and primarily male neighborhood (due to restrictive and discriminatory immigration laws) to a new community of young families. Now, three decades later, Glick has scanned his Chinatown negatives and made large prints. "It's exciting to revisit personal work that I did more than 30 years ago and interpret it digitally, a process that allows me the ability to get more out of a negative than I ever could in the darkroom," he says. "I'm able to give new life to old work. More importantly, time has changed me and the way that I see the work. I've found images, overlooked in the past, that due to the passage of time have taken on new meaning and import." For today's viewers, Glick's intimate portraits of Chinese immigrants on the streets, at work, and at home, are rare documents that capture a specific moment in time, a small chapter in the story of the American experience.

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