Chinatown looks at man behind the lens
‘For the first time, we get to see him’ as display honours prolific photographer
The small, round Yucho Chow Studio seal, with its Chinese characters and Vancouver Chinatown address, is embossed on hundreds of group and individual portraits taken over four decades during the early 1900s.
Most are now tucked in dusty albums in basements and attics across the city. They were taken by a jovial, prolific artist whose own image and story had been little known, and were fading away even for his own descendants, until now.
For years, Catherine Clement, as curator of the Chinese-Canadian Military Museum, had met with veterans and their relatives. They would bring out old family photos and, over and over again, Clement
would see that Yucho Chow seal. She said she started to link his photos together for a unique crispness or “a really interesting background,” the flair of a long, flowing curtain, or the modernity of a young boy plopped on a tricycle for a studio shot in the late 1920s.
By fluke, Clement was interviewing a woman about her husband one day when the conversation steered off to her grandfather.
From there, she was able to track down and recently unveil a life-size image of Chow himself as part of the city-backed Chinatown History Windows project.
Chow is wearing a pale-coloured three-piece suit and Panama hat with a dark ribbon. His broad face wears a warm smile. The year is 1927.
“He’s got kind of an air about him. In another (photo), he has a cigar and is sort of looking at the camera,” said Clement, who has been bringing to life “big pivotal moments and trends in Chinatown history,” but has a soft spot for this rather unsung one.
“All these hundreds and hundreds of families who have his seal in their photo albums. … And for the first time, we get to see him. Only a few people are left who ever met (Chow), and yet his work resides in the heritage vaults of so many families.”
Leonard Chow, 77, is a retired Vancouver dentist and Yucho’s grandson. He agreed that his grandfather’s contributions haven’t been much noted, although he does recall a photo of him that may have been hung in the halls of the Chinese Cultural Centre.
There is “a little bit” of talk among older family members, but “if the topic is never brought up” there isn’t much hearkening back to the days of when he was a young boy, watching his grandfather take countless photos. Sometimes, as the oldest grandson, he would stay overnight at the family’s studio, first on Pender Street and later on Main.
“When I was around four or five years old, I would spend quite a few days sleeping on three chairs pushed together with a blanket over me,” he said.
He remembers going to the railway station with his grandfather to take photos of newcomers stepping off the train. These would have been at the end of the years spanning the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1923, when immigration from China was closed, to gains made in 1947 when Chinese-Canadians won the right to vote.
When babies were born in Vancouver, Yucho Chow would take photos of them naked so families back in China could see a son had been born, Clement said. He would also take photos when people died in Vancouver so an unofficial but validating death certificate could be returned to families in China.
Aside from many wedding and class pictures, there are quietly poignant Yucho Chow photos such as one with an inscription that reads “members of the Chinese student concert in aid of the UBC stadium fund” in 1931. Another lost moment in time features six men standing outside the Quon On Jan Travel Agency at 7880 Seymour St. with owner Maw Sun Hay in 1915.
Chow also photographed many Japanese and South Asian families, Clement said.
Leonard Chow’s father Jack became an optometrist, but his uncles Peter and Philip and aunt Jessie all worked in the family studio.
“Aunt Jessie did the colouring,” taking oil paints to add dabs of pink, blue and yellow to black-andwhite photos, he said.
Leonard said his grandfather came to Vancouver around 1908, worked as a houseboy and then as an assistant to a photographer before striking out on his own.
“He was a prominent citizen. I remember on Sundays, he would take me around to visit all the Chinese benevolent societies and masons,” he said. “He greeted everyone by name and knew them all.”