In 2014, Lee and a group of Asian-Americans from around the country, including direct descendants of the Chinese railroad workers, reënacted the Promontory Summit photo. He referred to such moments as “photographic justice.” (“Photographic Justice” is the title of a documentary about Lee that the filmmaker Jennifer Takaki is currently working on.) “I’d like to think that every time I take my camera out of my bag,” he once told an interviewer, “it’s like drawing a sword to combat indifference, injustice and discrimination, trying to get rid of stereotypes.”
Our relationship to images—and the relationship between images and justice—has changed quite a bit since the seventies and eighties. We’re ever conscious of the fact that the cameras are running. The original Promontory Summit photo that set Lee on his way tells a story of hard work and collaborative effort, but it is a wholly whitewashed story. That the railroad men are posed for the portrait, grinning among themselves, as though they’re all in on the same joke, speaks to a kind of self-consciousness. They know they are entering into some kind of permanent record. Looking at the photo again this week, I thought about the Capitol rioters who were ensnared by our modern obsession with taking pictures of ourselves. It’s a kind of double entitlement—a sense that you are allowed to manipulate the levers of history, and that you’re in control of your posture and expression as you pose for the commemorative picture, too.
Not everyone feels quite so natural having their picture taken. Some don’t expect to be noticed at all. You could spend a few hours at the library or online and see nearly every published photograph of the Asian-American political movement of the sixties and seventies. A student once asked how significant this moment could have possibly been, since we were always referring to the same few images. It struck me that photos, for a younger generation, were no longer their own, autonomous kind of storytelling. We no longer feel invisible, the way Lee once did, even if we occasionally feel unseen. The young were approaching history from a vantage of abundance, when things that leave no digital footprint might as well have never happened.
