A Land of Shadows (2005-ongoing) is an inquiry into immigrant Chinese life in rural
19th century California—a communal
life that was itinerant, vulnerable, preyed upon, resilient, and centrally
important in the state’s and the nation’s history. Taking its title from
a traditional Chinese metaphor for the domain of the ancestors, the project
integrates my own photographs of the remnants of Chinese settlement in the Sierra Nevada foothills and the Sacramento Delta areas
into a forgotten compendium of government mug shots of Chinese immigrants, made
by D.D. Beatty in Downieville, circa 1890. The result is a remade book,
part document, part poetic archaeology. By asking historic and
contemporary pictures alternately to intervene on and slip away from one another,
the new book addresses disjunctions and silences within the historical
experience of the Chinese American community, and the difficulty of their
formation as memory.
