The award-winning public television film Vanishing Chinatown: The World of The May’s Photo Studio explores how much we can learn from the discarded images from a photography studio. After opening in 1923, May’s Photo Studio captured the history of San Francisco’s Chinatown for nearly 50 years. The collection of photographs from this one studio tells so many stories that were almost lost: how families separated by an ocean stayed connected; how Chinese immigrants wanted to be remembered; creative resistance to the Chinese Exclusion Act; and the community institutions that developed and flourished in Chinatown, especially Cantonese opera.
This captivating 27-minute film is available free on the PBS website at https://www.pbs.org/video/vanishing-chinatown-1rmqri/. A free classroom-friendly teacher’s guide for this film is available for download below. The guide is appropriate for advanced secondary students and university students.
This teacher’s guide provides the context for students to fully understand what the treasure trove of photographs from May’s Photo Studio can teach us about the past and about how media continue to shape our identity and sense of community even today. Before watching the film, students use contemporary media to represent themselves to better understand how we use images to shape our legacy.
Students then read a background piece on Chinese immigration to the United States and San Francisco’s Chinatown before watching the film and taking notes on its themes. Working in groups, they review posed photographs from the May’s Photo Studio collection and compare them to the images they used at the start of the unit.
Next, students imagine they lived in the time of May’s Photo Studio and create a photograph of how they would have wanted to be photographed at the time. They then review a playbill and photographs from a performance of Cantonese opera to understand why this art form played such a prominent role in the Chinatown community for decades and what led to its decline.
To conclude their exploration of the film, students curate a photographic exhibition on the Chinatown of May’s Photo Studio, where they act as docents to explain the importance and value of the photographs to a wider audience.
The development of this guide was made possible by Media Bridges, Inc.’s gayle k. yamada and Ephemera Pictures’ Lydia Tanji as well as additional funding from Lorelei Tanji and Jeremy Stone. SPICE also appreciates the generous support of the Chao Minami Family Fund for making the Visual Arts and Documentary Film initiative possible.