[Merchant and bodyguard in Chinatown, San Francisco] / Arnold Genthe, N.Y.

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A shopkeeper posed beside his bodyguard sets this view apart from the street scenes that make up much of Arnold Genthe's Chinatown work. Genthe, a German-born photographer who settled in San Francisco in the mid-1890s, spent years documenting the neighborhood's merchants, workers and residents, and his pictures were widely reproduced in the early 1900s. The presence of a hired guard reflects the rivalries among Chinatown's criminal tongs, which made commercial life there tense during these years. Today the prints are valued as a record of the community made by an outside observer working at a time when Chinatown was often portrayed through stereotype.

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