Sickly Sweet

A sickly sweet scent lingers in Arnold Genthe’s Old Chinatown photographs (1896–1906). Genthe, a German immigrant who was known for his portraits of presidents of the United States and prominent businessmen, began his artistic career by taking pictures on the streets of San Francisco’s Chinatown. While Genthe’s archive is celebrated for its soft-focus pictorialist style, less attention has been paid to the racialized discourse on Chinese atmospheres that produced this aesthetic effect. Contextualizing these images within the US anxiety about the “yellow peril” in the early twentieth century, which rendered the Chinese as noxious to the national atmosphere, this essay demonstrates that Genthe’s style emerged from these racialized fears of toxic air. Moving between the photographer’s images, his published memoir, and contemporaneous public health records, I chart an irresolvable sickly sweet scent in this visual archive through a method that I term “atmo-speculation.” Focusing on a lesser-known portrait by Genthe of an anonymous nude woman, I trace fetid air as a critical aesthetic through which we can sense insurgent forms of Chinese femininity in the US. Augmenting recent scholarship on minoritarian form, which approaches race through affect and sensation, I argue that feminist sensorial engagements with Genthe’s Old Chinatown photographs disturb national ideals of contained citizenship.