Picture this: You are a set of clothes hangers strung out on a rooftop clothesline, placed there by a family trying to extend their supply of square footage and fresh air in their small apartment (“Drying Laundry,” 2004). You are part of the family order created and maintained by the mother and captured by the photographer: In “Bathtime” (2004), for instance, you hang expectantly above the bath, and you are indispensable to “Family Portrait” (2004), framing the top edge of the composition with a line of coats. You watch the shadows grow long (“Peeking at the Neighbors,” 2003), watch a little boy bike around, watch him grow up. The little girl becomes a moody teenager, holding a flip phone in her hands (“Bored,” 2011), and then a smartphone (“Watching Black Mirror,” 2019). The stylish mother is now embracing her fashion sense — in “Outfit of the Day” (2024), she’s in full streetwear, including a tan jumpsuit and a Supreme bag.
Throughout The Lams of Ludlow Street, an exhibition of photographs by Thomas Holton at the Baxter St Camera Club of New York, certain objects, like those clothes hangers, will pop up over and over again. Holton’s photographs are drawn from his eponymous series, begun in 2003, that follows the Lams, a Chinese-American family living in New York City’s Chinatown. The project centers on domestic textures, drawing attention not only to where but how the Lams live. This risks fetishization: Part of the appeal of the series is peering into the lived realities of five people in a cramped, 350-square-foot apartment. And who can forget Israeli artist Omer Fast’s 2017 exhibition at James Cohan Gallery, also in Chinatown, in which he transformed the upscale gallery into what he imagined the space to have looked like beforehand — peeling awning, folding chairs, broken ATM?
There is a sensitive way to approach immigrant and/or diasporic aesthetics, and I think Holton does so here. These photos reveal the beauty emergent from a lifestyle of frequenting businesses run by those of the mother culture, of scrimping and upcycling, and of dutiful ingenuity. Small details caught my eye: the rainbow duster I’ve seen in many a shop in Flushing, the Chinatown of Queens (not to sound like Eric Adams); the calendars produced by Chinese pharmacies; the shoelace that holds a door open in “Passport Photos” (2003), reminding me of the SunnyD bottle my grandfather once affixed to a showerhead to increase the water pressure. Items like the family-sized box of Quaker oats in the background of “A Month Before College” (2018) feel vital to me, a symbol of how we subsume American brands into our culture rather than the other way around in the classic tale of immigrants assimilating or “Americanizing.”
Holton is an insider’s outsider, or maybe vice versa: A lifelong New Yorker of mixed Chinese and “American” descent, as the press release confusingly puts it, he grapples with a “sense of detachment from his Chinese roots” through this series, “bridg[ing] the gaps in his own identity through the lens of another family’s experiences.” Indeed, thresholds feature prominently. The ajar apartment door in “Passport Photos,” the first work on view, seems like the proverbial open door to the show for viewer and photographer alike. “Front Door” (2005) captures the Lams’ thickly painted apartment door from the outside, as if Holton can’t quite work his way inside.
I first saw a selection of these photos in May 2021, just a year after the police murder of George Floyd ignited international protests and racial reckoning. We were still in the thick of COVID-19, and its attendant rise in hate crimes against Asians. Across two-week iterations, four photographs — “Bath Time,” “Waiting for Dinner” (2011), “After Swimming” (2013), and “Watching ‘Black Mirror’” (all in this show)— were exhibited at Home gallery, a storefront window on Ludlow Street. As I wrote in a review for the Brooklyn Rail, I was initially discomfited by what I perceived to be a voyeuristic gaze, central to photography in general but particular to a photographer who wanted to understand himself better through his subjects. I was soothed after talking to Michael Lam, the oldest of the siblings, who spoke of Holton as an “uncle” who babysat the children while young and drove them to college a decade or more later.
Indeed, seen in this way — dozens of large and small photographs hung in loosely chronological order, with some in frames and others pinned directly to the wall — what comes through most clearly might be the depth of Holton’s commitment to the Lams, which transcends Ludlow Street. New works display elements of the their own self-fashioning, as the children have grown into themselves. My favorite piece in the show might be “Taylor Swift Karaoke” (2024), in which that once little girl is luminous, even ecstatic, singing with her eyes shut and her palm splayed open in what is decidedly not a Chinatown apartment. Even the style of the photographs shows signs of change: The blue and pink light (“bisexual lighting,” in internet parlance) of “A Crowded Christmas” (2024), which depicts her staring straight out at the camera, looks like it could be a still from Euphoria. “Lunar New Year Dinner” (2024) looks distinctly more Instagram-y to my eye — overhead perspective, saturated colors — than 2011’s subdued “Dinner for Seven,” taken from the perspective of a dinner guest.
The Lams of Ludlow Street inaugurates Baxter St Camera Club’s new white cube space — on Ludlow Street. It would have been an unthinkable tenant during much of the photographs’ time span. I hope it proves as rooted, committed, and accountable to its Lower East Side community as Holton has been to the Lams.
Thomas Holton: The Lams of Ludlow Street continues at Baxter St Camera Club of New York (154 Ludlow Street, Lower East Side, Manhattan) through August 13. The exhibition was organized by the institution.