The American photographer Irene Poon grew up in San Francisco’s Chinatown, where her father owned a store selling traditional herbal medicine. Graduating from art college in 1967, her work concentrated on the people and the community she lived among, glimpsing little moments of intimacy and surprise, telling their stories from the inside. Poon took this picture of her sister Virginia in 1965 in a sweet shop in the district. The composition seems drawn directly from feverish childhood imaginations – certainly, chocolate bars have rarely been cast in a more alarming light.
Poon, now 83, worked as a curator and art historian at the San Francisco State University art department for 45 years, helping to build its collection of 300,000 images stored on slides, and creating multiple exhibitions including landmark shows about the settlement of the American west and the role played by Asian communities in the gold rush and beyond. In 2001 she published an important guide to 25 formative Asian American artists who had inspired her photography, recognising several in print for the first time. Alongside her day job, Poon pursued her own work, continuing to document and reimagine the changing faces of Chinatown over the decades; those portraits, as here, often emerging from dramatically shadowed interiors.
This picture is included in a new expansive project at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, which opens in February and promises to be “the first comprehensive survey of American photography in Europe”. The exhibition and accompanying book will include the work of such luminaries as Robert Frank, Nan Goldin, Andy Warhol and Diane Arbus, alongside hundreds of other expressions of the most democratic art from the 19th century to the present. It is safe to say that, within that catalogue of images, no other candy store will have quite the resonance of that discovered by Irene Poon.
American Photography is at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, 7 February-9 June; an accompanying book is published by Nai010 (€45) on 3 February
