“I used photography to help be involved in the world.”
Michael Jang
“I didn’t know this until later, but I used photography to help be involved in the world,” Michael Jang reflected about the work he made in his twenties. “Photography gives you something to do. It’s the way you can interact.”
In the summer of 1973, Jang, freshly graduated from art school, was staying with relatives in the Bay Area while taking a summer course with photographer Lisette Model. He turned his camera toward his immediate surroundings: his extended Chinese American family and the trappings of their suburban lives. In one image, a flash captures his aunt Lucy with a spouting hose in hand, watering her garden at night; in another, a mixed-age group sits together on the couch, their faces blocked by glossy publications, from TV Guide to Mad magazine; in a third, his cousin Steve is “taking his turn” at playing Santa Claus, donning an oversized cotton-ball wig that almost hides his smirk.
The pictures are charmingly relatable while simultaneously debunking stereotypes of the “all-American” white family, yet “humor wasn’t totally intentional in these photos,” Jang has said. These and other pictures became part of a series he calls The Jangs. They are the result of Jang having a camera as his constant companion at family gatherings, a mode through which he took part in his family and culture. “When I look back at the work, you see that they are not guarded. You have to live with people to get those kinds of shots.”
These pictures—sharing the fate of so many family photographs—ended up in a cardboard box in Jang’s home, together with the rest of the work he made during his school years. For decades he did not share the work publicly. After graduating with an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1977, Jang built a successful career as a photographer, but rather than making photographs as an art practice, he did it “to make a living,” taking on jobs as a hired photographer for weddings and Bar Mitzvahs, as well as magazine commissions. His earlier student work has become widely known only in recent years, after he decided to drop off a selection of his prints from the 1970s at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art for an unsolicited print review in 2002. His work has since been presented in many exhibitions in the Bay Area and beyond.
From his first photography class, at California Institute of the Arts in 1971, Jang had a sense that he wanted to approach photography with a sense of spontaneity. After his professor Ben Lifson shared slides of images by Lee Friedlander, Garry Winogrand, and Diane Arbus—whose work was featured in the 1967 New Documents exhibition at MoMA—Jang was inspired by the immediacy of their street-photography approaches. He borrowed a Leica camera from his school and took it to Los Angeles, finding extraordinary subjects—including some recognizable celebrities—at a ritzy hotel party. He eventually developed a series of photographs, called Beverly Hilton, by attending exclusive parties week after week, managing to get inside by crafting fake press passes or dressing up in a suit and sneaking in the back door. “I never wanted to be a paparazzi—they did that as a job,” he said. “We were just at the same events but I was taking a photo class and they were making a living. I had the freedom to do as I pleased.” The sense of openness and possibility in these early pictures remained vivid, ready to be rediscovered decades later.
Lucy Gallun, Associate Curator, Department of Photography, 2022
