East of Broadway
October 6 – 30, 2011
I went as an actor to shoot a movie in Beijing. It was a Chinese film, with Chinese financing and a Chinese director and crew and, except for a few Western expatriots living in Beijing and two actors brought in from the US, a Chinese cast. The whole thing was an immersion into Chinese culture and after filming was over and I returned to New York, I was reluctant to let the experience go. I found myself going down to Chinatown in Manhattan and somehow feeling as though I was more at home there than elsewhere in Manhattan. It was as though I could visit China but with a much shorter commute. I found the Chinese continually fascinating in China and here too in the US, with one big difference. In China I was the visitor, the tourist, the one learning to belong. All the Chinese were on home ground. In New York I was the one on home ground and all the Chinese were the immigrants, the tourists as it were, struggling to survive and leaning to belong.
I returned the Chinatown, specifically the East Broadway section, often over the following several years. It was a bustling, entrepreneurial place and full of recently arrived Chinese (often from Fujian) and those visits kept the experiences of my time in China fresh and expanded them.
The forces of gentrification are moving in now and Chinatown is no longer the uniquely flavorful section of Manhattan it used to be.
Originally from Hamtramck, Michigan, Dan Ziskie is a Manhattan-based photographer. Ziskie began photographing in the early 1970s in Chicago, where he also worked as an assistant to the commercial photographer Curt Burkhart. His current work focuses on what is revealed socially and culturally in urban public spaces. Ziskie’s photographs have been exhibited at Photo Center NW, Seattle; the Center for the Photographic Image, Philadelphia; and images from “East of Broadway” appeared in The New York Times.
