I will take a street photography approach to document the various overlapping and juxtaposing cultures that reside in Koreatown by walking through several of the major streets including the area’s official borders, documenting vernacular images – images of everyday and common place life, signs, artifacts, and architecture seen from the point of view of the street and meeting people walking about on any given day. The following section will describe the ways I will document Koreatown’s overlapping cultures, providing several examples of similar projects by both social scientists and documentary style photographers.

Social scientists, Georgio Curti, Zu Salim, and Vienne Vu, documented various Asian enclaves through Los Angeles using photography as a way to give recognition to the overlooked parts of these communities. They too wanted to affirm Los Angeles as a multilayered, multi-cultural landscape. Their aim was to affirm the quality of Los Angeles as a mosaic by providing “visual glimpses into a diasporic imagination that recognizes the diversity of diasporas and honors the different histories and memories” (Curti, Salim, and Vu, 2013). They chose the camera as a recording device by virtue of the picture taking event: the camera’s ability to interfere with, to invade, or to ignore whatever is going on (2013).

The authors sought to show mosaic Los Angeles through fragmented views of what they saw as interesting in the daily occurrences of the city’s Asian communities. Like Atget, the authors too could not help but acknowledge how their own personal experiences influenced their documentation.

While living in China, it was revealed that my mother was Lebanese, and upon this realization, a Chinese host excitedly declared, with a determined and aggressive certainty that left no room for disagreement or argument, that – even being born and raised in Los Angeles, my remaining language fluency only in English, and half of my ethnic heritage originating from Italy – “You are Asian” (Curti, Salim, and Vu, 2013).

From a symbolic point of view, their project could be seen as a metaphor for the researchers’ own experience: feeling overlooked, they sought to document what they saw as needing recognition. The authors adopted the old street photography concept of the flâneur. The street for the flâneur housed the façade of buildings as well as “the dwelling place of the collective”, and for the collective, the flâneur set in the context of the French Revolution and the ascent of Napoleon’s modernism, the buildings represented a decoration for the privileged class (Curti, Salim, and Vu, 2013). Following the approach of the flâneur, they wanted to challenge a status quo of multiculturalism that “simply represented cultural difference without bringing qualitative changes to our inclusions of the practices, perspectives and values of difference into the operations of the public sphere” (Curti, Salim, and Vu, 2013).

My focus will be specifically on the area of Koreatown in Los Angeles defined beyond its official boundaries from Olympic Boulevard to the South where many of Koreatown’s oldest establishments still operate; Third Street to the North that welcomes a small Bengali community who share space with residents from Central America; Beverly Boulevard representing the official Northern border of Koreatown where mostly Central American businesses, markets, and papusa restaurants can be seen along the Boulevard east of Alexandria Street up to the Metro Station; Western Avenue to the West where pedestrians can experience a wide variety of mixed use, mixed generation, Korean and Hispanic establishments; Vermont Avenue to the East representing Koreatown’s eastern most border; and Pico Avenue, not technically part of the official boundaries of Koreatown according to Los Angeles County. However, Pico Avenue represents a large proportion of Central American and Mexican American establishments and has been traditionally included as part of city project planning initiatives for Koreatown.

I will take a multi-local approach as Curti, Salim and Vu had with their photo documentary project on the mosaic of Asian American communities in Los Angeles, documenting what I find interesting and relevant to the theme of capturing Koreatown’s layers of often times overlapping multiculturalism. Regarding the ethnographic approach of social scientists, Margaret Rodman problematized place in social science as being defined too narrowly within the concepts that social science assumes, ignoring place’s narrative and historic value (1992).  On the contrary, she argued place and its artifacts are as valuable as voice in the social sciences by virtue of a place’s multiple contexts (Rodman, 1992). Visual records of places and their artifacts can signify the various cultural histories that have and still continue to reside in Koreatown. I will use Rodman’s concept of multi-local ethnography as an observing technique through the exploration of some of Koreatown’s major avenues. “The idea is that any cultural identity or activity is constructed by multiple agents in varying contexts, or places, and that ethnography must be strategically conceived to represent this sort of multiplicity” (Rodman, 1992).

The types of images I will make for this project fall under two categories under the documentary photography style, “static” and “lyrical”.  The lyrical style refers to volatile images, those richest in emotion by subjects. He described static photographs as “richest in meditativeness, in mentality, in attentiveness to the wonder of materials and of objects, and in complex multiplicity of attitudes of perception.”  These images will include the various signs and artifacts as records of Koreatown’s various overlapping cultures. Walker Evans described a term “vernacular” as anything untaught, unofficial, described in contrast to the “accomplished art” found in museums. For Evans, he said the street was his museum, a place of various cultural artifacts, the everyday life, and common place things (Katz, 1971). Vernacular images are images of the commonplace and everyday life and are a sub-category of the “static” style.

One specific example of the static style was a project by Walker Evans called Signs. Evans’ series focused on the various signs and advertisements that pervaded the buildings of New York, among other places, during the early and mid-twentieth century. He described America during that time as a place invaded by lettering in every nook and cranny and even in the skylines. One image for example shows three large signs juxtaposed in vertical layers, glowing signs for Lucky Strike, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and the REV. The choice of cropping cuts the lettering in half to fit a portrait style frame that reads like “concrete poetry”, expressing a “conscious opposition to whatever ‘meaning’ the signs themselves were intended to communicate” (Keller, 1998). The signs are thus re-contextualized beyond the advertisement’s original purposes to convey a polemic statement about the pervasiveness of consumerism. His intent was to challenge an optimism, “urging people to partake in the constant overproduction of goods” during a social context of depression stricken America (Keller, 1998).

Two of the motifs I will focus on for my images will be signs and buildings. Koreatown provides several blocks for opportunities to record the various juxtaposing cultures that live and work there. Evan’s Signs showed that the static image can provide opportunities for contemplation about the presence of cultures, in his case, the advertising culture that failed to acknowledge the realities of depression era America and was embedding itself in the vernacular of everyday life. An area like Koreatown continues to undergo various levels of structural and cultural change. It is a contested and mutable space between residential life, transnational interests, and the interests of domestic investors, who become intertwined in the area’s networks and infrastructures and whose effects impact the local culture and economy. When these outside changes make life more challenging for the local class of residents as described in chapter 2, it is because outside interests have failed to understand or be sensitive to the area’s social ecosystem. It is my aim to use the static approach to show in what ways these various layers of culture and development interests overlap with one another.

Additionally, I will approach some of the residents to gather a random sampling of people who are out and about on any given day. Trachtenberg described social documentary style photography as a survey. When Lewis Hine was working on his project Charities and the Commons in Pittsburg, Trachtenberg said he approached the city as a kind of survey investigator – a social worker or specialist who would comb the city to uncover facts about the ethnic composition of Pittsburgh’s workers, their housing conditions, and family life (1977, p 246). The survey was key for Hine because it provided a structural form for him to work from and a point of view that would provide cohesiveness to his images. It was a reformist’s tool. Trachtenberg said the assumption is that “once the plain facts, the map of the social terrain, are clear to everyone, then change or reform will naturally follow” as had been the case for Jacob Riis who had surveyed the slums of New York. The appeal moved legislators to pass housing reforms that would improve their living conditions by challenging what was thought to be true by providing records of what was actually true (Trachtenberg, 1977, p. 247).

For the survey component of my project, I will take portraits of the people I meet who are out and about in the streets of Koreatown. Portraits are an effective way to account for an area’s cultural makeup. Kozloff argued that most portraits registered the bonding of people to their community, which is why studio portraits for the type of work that “accounts” for community members becomes problematic. “The studio functionally, was a non-environment whose neutrality could be accentuated or partially and affectedly reconstructed… Peopling such threadbare scenes, with their schematic décor, the figure was not only alienated, but deprived of any potential for natural movement” (Kozloff, 1976, p. 133). I will approach each of the people I meet and photograph with the following questions in mind.

Interview questions

1. Do you live or work in Koreatown?
2. How long have you lived or worked here?
3. What are the biggest changes you have observed or experienced in Koreatown?
4. What changes would you like to see? What do you feel people need who live and work in Koreatown?

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Curti, G. H., Salim, Z., & Vu, V. (2013). L.A. East: a photographic journey through Asian Los Angeles. University of Hawaii Press, 75, 28 – 68

Katz, L. (1971). An interview with Walker Evans. V. Goldberg (Ed.). New York: Simon and Schuster, 1981. 358 – 369

Keller, J. (1998). Walker Evans Signs

Kozloff, M. (1976). Nadar and the republic of mind. V. Goldberg (Ed.). New York: Simon and Schuster, 1981. 129 – 140

Rodman, M. (1992). Empowering place: multilocality and multivocality. American Anthropologist, 94, 640 – 656 

Trachtenberg, A. (1977). Lewis Hine: the world of his art. V. Goldberg (Ed.). New York: Simon and Schuster, 1981. 238 – 253