Vancouver Chinese-Canadian photographer’s portraits of immigrants – black, Chinese, Sikh – a reminder of their role in building the city
- A curator’s curiosity was piqued when she kept coming across portraits of immigrant families in Vancouver taken by a Chinese Canadian, Yucho Chow
- Catherine Clement soon learned he hadn’t only shot Chinese subjects, and bit by bit uncovered Chow’s own story – that of a scrappy migrant, like his subjects
Catherine Clement began to notice the seals on old black-and-white photos more than 10 years ago, when the curator was interviewing Chinese-Canadian veterans of World War II in Vancouver. When the elderly men showed her formal portraits taken in a studio, she saw that the seal on the cardboard frame bore the name Yucho Chow.
“After the sixth photo I googled him, and that’s when I discovered there was nothing on him, or a little bit on his photos but no photos of him and no information on who he was, and that started this journey,” Clement recalls.
Her curiosity led her on a decade-long search to discover more about Chow, one photograph and one family at a time.
Many of the pictures Clement found were of young male Chinese immigrants in ill-fitting suits, or young families showing off their latest offspring to send to their families back in China. In her first five years working on the project, however, she still had not seen a photo of the man himself.
“He was like this phantom, this ghost. His work was everywhere but he was nowhere. I was trying to imagine what this man had looked like.”
Then, sometime around 2015, Clement interviewed the wife of a veteran in her late eighties and asked the woman about her story. When she said Chow was her grandfather, Clement immediately asked if she had pictures of him.