Thomas Holton’s “The Lams of Ludlow Street”

Since 2003, Thomas Holton has been making photographs of the Lams, a Chinese American family—Steven, Shirley, and their three children—that the photographer approached through University Settlement, an organization providing services to low-income and immigrant families in Lower Manhattan. In this exhibition, the resulting artworks proceed in roughly chronological order across three walls in the rear of the gallery, such that pictures of the same apartment face each other across the span of two decades. We see the consequent changes: what was originally a kitchen has, by 2023, become a bedroom (Sleeping in the Old Kitchen).

The durational quality of the series, which forms the heart of Holton’s photographic practice, addresses the illusion of stability suggested by the home. The work narrates familial transformation even as the Lams remain headquartered—albeit to varying degrees—within a single dwelling. In a monograph published in 2016, Holton describes how he abstained from photographing the home (though he remained involved) between 2005–10, when Steven and Shirley divorced. Viewers can nonetheless surmise the break from the series’ expansion out of Ludlow Street thereafter: picturing Steven’s New Jersey Apartment (2014), the quarters of Shirley’s home-care patients where she sometimes takes up residence in Bored (2011), or Online at a Friend’s (2011) and Dorm Room Floor (2022), where the children eventually relocate.

Providing an ethnographic glimpse into tenement living, echoing the documentary works of muckrakers Jacob Riis or Lewis Hine, Holton’s early images brim with evidence of how the family made do with limited space. In Flowers in the Tub (2005) or Washing the Dishes (2005), for instance, bathrooms and kitchen double as storage. This doubling is duly articulated in Passport Photos (2003), a picture of the three young children holding their headshots, and in Chinese Soap Opera (2005), where Shirley watches another female lead on screen while stirring a bowl with chopsticks. Later in the series, the double presents a simultaneity of privacies laid bare. In Waiting for Dinner (2011), Holton’s camera takes in both sides of a curtain that hangs between two siblings in an attempted boundary. Elsewhere, a child’s dangling leg encroaches upon a napping parent’s space below the titular Michael on the Upper Bunk (2012).

These transversals not only represent the exigencies of tenement living conditions but also signal the photographer’s own position as an outsider seeking entry and inclusion. After all, Holton’s immersion in the Lams’ world imparts a personal incentive. As the son of a white American travel photographer who married a Chinese tour guide who had absconded to Taiwan, Holton has described feeling estranged from Chinatown’s community despite his grandparents living there.1 Here, photography not only breaches interiority; it also serves as an alibi for intimacy, inhabitation, and insight. Picturing and viewing such closeness (of both the tenement and the family) collapses the dialectics of inside/outside as Holton navigates his own biracial identity by inviting subsequent viewers into the home of the Lams. This is exemplified by Front Door (2005), a photo of the peephole into the Lams’ apartment, a view from the outside desiring to look in.

Although Chinese food remains a familiar throughline in Holton’s photographs—from Family Portrait (2004) to Dinner for Seven (2011) to Lunar New Year Dinner (2024)—what started as a project attempting to capture the moving target of ethnic authenticity has evolved into a series that attends to everyday choreographies of space and family life. Just shy of playing cultural broker or voyeur, Holton has utilized the Chinatown tenement to not only proffer glimpses into a working-class immigrant interiority and aesthetic but to also present a spatial metaphor for the attunement of an inside/outside negotiated by the Lams, as well as the artist, throughout these works. Holton’s careful crops, at times cutting off figures or furniture, remind viewers that more overflows the photographic frames.

Outside the Lams’ apartment, the shadow of rapid development and gentrification has pushed Baxter St at the Camera Club of NY to relocate to Ludlow St, roughly a mile from its original location.2 The gallery’s decision to inaugurate their new space with Holton’s work in some ways mirrors their—and the photographer’s—affinity for Chinatown; to reflexively align with the issue of displacement that so threatens many of its longtime residents facing the encroachment of cultural industries, those harbingers of luxury development, not to mention the site proposed for the world’s tallest mega-jail, just a block away from Baxter St’s namesake.3

Though the Lams’ children, like the gallery, have moved away, one wonders what will be left of those who remain—and how readings of Holton’s documentation might be transformed by these shifting contexts.