by Renny Pritikin
Irene Poon’s career, the subject of a retrospective at SF State, has been especially rich. It includes mentoring younger artists, curating exhibitions, writing books, gathering an important photo collection of her contemporaries and showing her own work. Moving Pictures: The Photography of Irene Poon, 1960s to the Present, organized by Sharon Bliss and Kevin B. Chen, represents the culmination of a life committed to the Bay Area and her Asian-American community. It includes dozens of her works and highlights from her collection.
By her mid-twenties, Poon had been included in a three-person show at the de Young Museum and was the subject of a solo exhibition at SFMOMA, both in 1965. But, because the art world of 50 years ago wasn’t nearly as inclusive as it is today, Poon worked mainly behind the scenes in the photography department at SF State.
Her images fall into three categories: everyday scenes of life in Chinatown and other nearby locations; images, often in color, that achieve abstraction by documenting odd lighting effects brought on by architectural quirks and odd camera angles; and witty, almost surreal images of people at work and at leisure. The latter group includes her best-known works, a few of which are among the iconic Northern California photographs of the second half of the 20th century and some from this century. Hair to Stay (2015) for example, has a beautiful young woman wearing a large black hat that might be made of her own hair teased into the air like a tall shrub. A Picture Spot (1990), a scene shot at the zoo, plays tricks with the viewer’s eye. In this, a white tiger bracketed by a bisected tree trunk appears dangerously close to a man sitting on a wall. Close scrutiny reveals the wall to be further from the cage than it seems.
Other pictures reveal the artist’s penchant for capturing the intersection of portraiture, commerce and humor, sometimes with surrealist overtones Virginia (1965) shows the artist’s sister from the shoulders up at work behind a counter, sporting prim clothing and a flip hairdo, surrounded by a halo of candy bars. It captures a telling moment when San Francisco was entering a time of great social ferment that had yet to be reflected in work-a-day Chinatown. Surrealist-tinged portraits include a 1996 portrait of Ruth Asawa, Ruth and Friends, depicting the sculptor surrounded by a cloud of her ceramic masks mounted on a wall. Similarly, Prisoner of Colors (1964) has a young man’s head lit from below, his body hidden by hundreds of paint tubes stretching from the middle of the frame to the foreground.
Another suite of pictures highlights Poon’s interest in recording images that appear to defy visual logic. Dream Walkers (2010) portrays three young men, all standing or seated on street lights, fire alarm boxes and the like. They are undoubtedly looking at a passing parade, but Poon cleverly excludes that information. Similarly, Chicago (1989) shows a young man in a corporate environment casually standing atop a large metal sculpture where he clearly doesn’t belong. While funny, these images also point to some of the strange qualities of public space and the male privilege of minor trespassing.
Documentary street scenes are another of Poon’s fortes. Highlights include Yeah! (2006), which has three kids playing in the gutter a la Helen Levitt; Spectators (1969), of an aproned shopkeeper gently cradling a child’s head; and Trusting in Grandfather, of a little girl grasping the man’s index finger. Standout abstract images include A Quiet Place (1977), wherein light from a window illuminates a stone shelf; and Music (1977), a color image of light penetrating Venetian blinds, casting shadows that resemble musical staffs.
Poon has a remarkable network of friends with whom she has traded prints. Included in the display of her collection are such notable names as Ansel Adams (Cedar Trees in Snow, Yosemite National Park, California, c. 1940); Imogen Cunningham (My Father at 90, 1936); Wright Morris (Faulkner Country, Near Oxford, Mississippi, 1939); Minor White (Still Life, undated); and Paul Strand (Virgin, San Felipe, Oaxaca, 1932). The show also includes standout contributions from Gerald Ratto (Chinese Mother with Children, undated), of a stylish mom in the late 1940s beside a row of cars; Benjamen Chinn (Chinatown Mailboxes, undated), depicting an apartment lobby crowded floor-to-ceiling with mailboxes, reflecting the overcrowded condition of the building and Chinatown itself; and Charles Wong’s Campaigner (1950), of a couple walking arm-in-arm, the woman wearing an unfortunate fashion choice.
Irene Poon’s career is a model for an approach in which an artist digs deep into her com-munity. Moving Images, a history lesson’s worth of photographic excellence, is a testament to just such an alternative way of measuring success.
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Moving Pictures: The Photography of Irene Poon, 1960s to the Present @ San Francisco State Fine Arts Gallery through July 29, 2022.
About the author: Renny Pritikin was the chief curator at The Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco from 2014 to 2018. Before that, he was the director of the Richard Nelson Gallery at UC Davis and the founding chief curator at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts beginning in 1992. For 11 years, he was also a senior adjunct professor at California College of the Arts, where he taught in the graduate program in Curatorial Practice. Pritikin has given lecture tours in museums in Japan as a guest of the State Department, and in New Zealand as a Fulbright Scholar, and visited Israel as a Koret Israel Prize winner. The Prelinger Library published his most recent book of poems, Westerns and Dramas, in 2020. He is the United States correspondent for Umbigo magazine in Lisbon, Portugal.