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| First picture taken in SF Chinatown in 20+ years. Photo: © Stan Banos |
OK, so maybe he was a perv (Found In Brooklyn remains one of my fave photo books), but Thomas Roma had it right when he told his students to stay the hell outta Chinatown. Something about treating certain ethnicities as exotic, and therefore premium photographic fodder; it's not even about being racist- more the danger that the foreign exoticism itself becomes the actual raison d'être for the photo's existence, rather than the actual content, composition or uniqueness. And basically one ends up with little more than... well composed travel photos. The same danger also persists should one end up traveling the thousands of miles to capture that exoticism in its actual country of origin.
Of course, some people are more than happy with photos striving for that Nat Geo look, but even in Nat Geo one would get treated to that rare individual photograph that manifested a core universal humanity- or an instance that seemed to transcend our very humanity...
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