With an approach to street photography more friendly than voyeuristic, San Francisco photographer Irene Poon invites viewers to recollect that the majority of life is made up of small, inconsequential but beautiful moments.
For the month of July, the Fine Arts Gallery at San Francisco State University is presenting a solo show of Poon’s work dating from 1962 to 2015. If you usually visit only the big local museums, this is the perfect time to reconsider. Poon’s work has been shown previously at the de Young Museum, the Crocker Art Museum and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Seeing her photographs at San Francisco State, where she worked for 45 years, is kind of like seeing Robin Williams play a local comedy club.
Along with Poon’s images, Fine Arts Gallery Director Sharon Bliss and curator Kevin B. Chen decided to include selections from her personal collection. Among the 80 objects on display are images by famed photographers Ansel Adams, Robert Bechtle, Benjamen Chinn, Imogen Cunningham, Miné Okubo, Walker Evans, Minor White and Charles Wong – many of them Poon’s friends, attesting to her deep ties to the artistic community.
In 2016, Poon told The Chronicle, “You can never really leave your home place.” And she hasn’t. Born in Chinatown in 1941 to immigrants from Guangzhou, Poon remained in San Francisco, earning her Bachelor of Arts in 1964 and Master of Arts in 1967 from what was then San Francisco State College. After graduation, while employed as a visual resource librarian at San Francisco State, Poon worked as an activist and curator, organizing exhibits and publishing groundbreaking books on Asian American art history.
At age 81, she and her partner, 99-year-old photographer Charles Wong, still live in San Francisco.
With the sharp detail and warmth only film photography can produce, Poon’s images of Chinatown from the 1960s and 1970s present a world lost with the passage of time, the loosening of segregation and assimilation.
In “Portsmouth Square” from 1968, a young girl sits with her grandmother on a bench. The crisp metal rungs of the mundane sidewalk grate behind them insist on its palpable presence and, by extension, that of the two subjects – so much so, you can’t help but feel the fullness of their lives. Their personhood is never in doubt. That feels important in 2022 as we confront another cycle of anti-Asian racism.
The back of a chair blocks one corner of the 1965 image titled “Memories of the Universal Cafe.” The people gathered around the table are haphazardly arranged. Poon doesn’t bother to privilege the viewer; her camera’s perspective is that of the passerby, the community member. We see the diners and their bowls of rice as if we were casually walking through the tables ourselves.
Poon’s use of the camera as an integrated part of the community differentiates her work from Walker Evans’ pitying gaze while photographing the destitute of the Great Depression, or Diane Arbus’ fixation on marginalized people she called “freaks.” Instead, Poon’s camera shows up like a friendly neighbor, something you can see reflected in the small boy’s face returning her gaze through a window in 2015’s “Breaking Out.”
“It’s exactly what you would be seeing,” said Chen of Poon’s work. “There’s a sense of intimacy; there’s a sense of non-voyeurship.”
“They’re very generous images. There’s no judgment in them,” added Bliss. “Poon’s openness invites a seemingly endless number of fleeting, precious moments of public intimacy — the kind we more standoffish mortals might encounter only occasionally.
“She thought life was really interesting.”
Luckily for us, Poon decided to share the quotidian magic with us. Finding Chinese bi discs hanging off a white painted garden trellis in an ordinary suburban yard in 1982’s “Brigham City, Utah, detail,” feels like a friend whispering a secret in solidarity.
If you haven’t heard of Irene Poon but admire Ansel Adams, it’s time to see her work.
“The work is incredible and she is in these different collections … she had all of this success early in her career,” Bliss said. “So what is it about how works are valued or studied or taught that some folks — oftentimes women, oftentimes people of color — don’t make it into the canon?”
It’s about time we had a more humane and inclusive history of street photography.
“Moving Pictures: The Photography of Irene Poon, 1960s to Present”: Noon-4 p.m. Tuesday-Friday. Through July 29. Free. Advanced ticket required. Fine Arts Gallery Room 238, Fine Arts Building, San Francisco State University, 1600 Holloway Ave., S.F. 415-338-6535. https://gallery.sfsu.edu