Paper Family Photography: Photography and the State in the Era of Chinese Exclusion (1882–1943)

Abstract

This article examines the use of photography in family immigration records of Chinese immigrating to the United States during Chinese exclusion. During the era of Chinese exclusion (1882–1943), Chinese individuals could only enter the United States as American citizens or family of American citizens. Therefore, the governmental record-keeping regarding Chinese families was both extensive and fundamental to managing Chinese immigration. As this article shows, photography was an integral part of recording Chinese family networks, both biological and what is now referred to as ‘paper families,’ individuals who fraudulently claimed biological kinship to American citizens for the purpose of immigration. I consider how photographs in the immigration records of related family members (sometimes revealed years later to be paper families) constitute a type of ‘family photography’ deeply connected to the regulation of Chinese immigration during the exclusion era. I argue that family was not only constituted through the biological but also through the continual navigation of bureaucratic practices of surveillance, testimony, and official family record-keeping. These ‘paper family photographs’ actively participated in the processes by which formations of family were continually made and remade, defined and redefined, both by those immigrating and those enforcing immigration law.