Chow Work (2015 Street Photography Awards Submission)

As a photographic artist I am consistently drawn to people and portraiture; I also tend to gravitate toward narrative details or small but defining moments as a means of exploring themes, ideas, and emotions. As a photographer with a strong interest in documentary styles and subjects, I am naturally drawn to the practice of street photography; it’s something I like to engage in when I’m not working on an assignment or a specific personal project. Or even if I am working on an assignment or a project, I often find that I get inspired and energized about photography and my work if I simply take myself and my camera to a particular neighborhood or section of town to see what I might find. The neighborhoods and cultural enclaves of San Francisco are wonderful places to explore in this way, and I often frequent areas where there’s a robust ethnic or immigrant population, as I always seem to learn or discover something new. For this particular body of work (of which there is a lot more than I could include in my submission!) -- made over a period of several years in the “Chinatowns” of San Francisco and Los Angeles -- I started to notice various recurring themes or leitmotifs and logical pairings. Ideally the photographs in my submission would be presented in pairs; it is my hope that the intended pairings will be clear to the viewer.