Snapshots of the Past

Man smoking pipe in shack doorway, San Pedro Chinatown – Historic Reproduction

Man smoking pipe in shack doorway, San Pedro Chinatown, [no date recorded on caption card] — historic photograph
Man smoking pipe in shack doorway, San Pedro Chinatown, [no date recorded on caption card]. Historic photograph from the Historic Print Archive collection.

(Originally scanned by the Library of Congress. Each image is professionally and digitally cleaned of artifacts such as color bars and extra borders prior to printing.)

Description

This rare historic photograph captures Man smoking pipe in shack doorway, San Pedro Chinatown in remarkable detail. It comes from the collections of the Library of Congress, scanned from the original and carefully restored.

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Man smoking pipe in shack doorway, San Pedro Chinatown

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A man sits smoking a pipe in the doorway of a small wooden shack in San Pedro's Chinatown, a waterfront neighborhood near the Los Angeles harbor. Arnold Genthe, a German-born photographer known for his street scenes in San Francisco's Chinatown, made the picture, though the record gives no date. Many Chinese residents of San Pedro worked in fishing and other harbor trades, and their homes were shaped by the economic and legal pressures of the Chinese Exclusion era. The caption's tobacco tag points to the pipe as the picture's focus, giving it the feel of a quiet everyday moment rather than a formal portrait.

Created / published[no date recorded on caption card]
Medium1 photographic print.
NotesPhotoprint by Arnold Genthe. This record contains unverified data from caption card. Caption card tracings: Geogr.; Tobacco.
SourceLibrary of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division
Original scan1,536 × 1,106 px · prints to 5 × 4 in at 300 dpi
ReferenceAMZ-SOTP-HPA-171283

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