The Life and Work of Doctor-Turned-Photographer Zun Lee

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

Now, I have always believed that what is now widely considered one of slavery’s worst legacies—the Southern “one-drop” rule that indicted anyone with black blood as a nigger and cleaved American society into black and white with a single stroke—was also slavery’s only upside. Of course I deplore the motive behind the law, which was rooted not only in white paranoia about miscegenation, but in a more practical need to maintain social order by keeping privilege and property in the hands of whites. But by forcing blacks of all complexions and blood percentages into the same boat, the law ironically laid a foundation of black unity that remains in place today. It’s a foundation that allows us to talk abstractly about a ” black community” as concretely as we talk about a black community in Harlem or Chicago or L.A.’s South Central (a liberty that’s often abused or lazily applied in modern discussions of race). And it gives the lightest-skinned among us the assurance of identity that everybody needs to feel grounded and psychologically whole—even whites, whose public non-ethnicity is really ethnicity writ so large and influential it needs no name. Being black may still not be the most advantageous thing in the world, but being nothing or being neutral—the rallying cry of modern-day multiculturalists—has never made any emotional or real-world sense. Color marks you, but your membership in black society also gives you an indestructible house to live in and a bed to rest on. I can’t imagine growing up any other way.

Erin Aubry Kaplan, Black Talk, Blue Thoughts, and Walking the Color Line: Dispatches from a Black Journalista, (Lebanon, New Hampshire: University Press of New England, 2011), 16.

The Life and Work of Doctor-Turned-Photographer Zun Lee

The Life and Work of Doctor-Turned-Photographer Zun Lee

PetaPixel
2016-02-13

Michael Zhang, Founder & Co-Editor

By day, Zun Lee is a doctor in Toronto, Canada. When he’s not working, he’s often unwinding from stress with a camera in hand. As a self-taught photographer, his documentary and street projects have caught the eye of The New York Times, The New Yorker, Magnum, and more.

The 8-minute video above by Format’s InFrame is an inspiring look at Lee’s life and work.

Lee first got into photography in 2009 after a colleague gifted him with a camera…

Read the entire article here.

Tags: Michael Zhang, PetaPixel, photography, Zun Lee

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 1st, 2016 at 01:08Z and is filed under Articles, Arts, Asian Diaspora, Media Archive, Videos. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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Mixed Race Studies

The Life and Work of Doctor-Turned-Photographer Zun Lee

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