Picturing a Chinatown Family Across Twenty

When Thomas Holton, a photography graduate student, strolled through Chinatown in the early two-thousands, snapping street shots, he found the resulting photos to be “superficial”—no different from the pictures any tourist might take. During one particular walk, he looked upward, took in the little windows of the apartment buildings lining the way, and saw where he really wanted to be—on the other side of the glass, behind the closed doors, capturing portraits of what everyday life was really like for those who called the neighborhood home. An image he took that day, which became the cover of his first book, embodies Holton’s curiosity about these thresholds to private worlds: a door textured and stippled with layers of red paint, marked with the apartment number fifteen.

Holton’s desire