Professor Marci Kwon’s lecture explores the remarkable body of photographs produced by May’s Photo Studio, one of the most prominent Chinese-run photography studios in San Francisco’s Chinatown. From its opening in 1923 until the mid-1960s, the wife-and-husband Isabella May Lee and Leo Chan Lee documented weddings, special events, Cantonese opera productions, and even produced erotic photographs for Chinese immigrants during the height of the Chinese Exclusion Act. The resulting archive, currently housed in Stanford Special Collections, offers an unprecedented snapshot of daily life in San Francisco Chinatown from the perspective of its inhabitants, akin to James Van Der Zee’s famed photographs of Harlem.