PBA Galleries

Archive of business records of Isabelle May Lee and Leo Chan [Yai Sing] Lee, May’s Photo Studio, San Francisco. Including:

• Handwritten book apparently purchased in Canton and recording loans to friends and relatives in San Francisco’s Chinatown, 6x10", with calligraphic writing on approximately 200 pages. Ca. 1923 (based on tipped-in Post Office receipt), the year May’s Photo Studio was established in Chinatown.
• 3 books of check stubs: May’s Photo Studio account, Bank of Canton, San Francisco, June 1944-April 1945 (9 slips of Chinese calligraphic writing laid in); unidentified account, probably of the Photo Studio, April 1950-Feb. 1951; checking account of the Young Wo School, 750 Sacramento (adjacent to the Photo Studio, located at 770 Sacramento), San Francisco, Jan.1943-Feb.1945, most written to Chinese surnames; and one book of unused checks from Oriental Branch of Bank of America on Grant Avenue. 

“For decades”, according to art historians, “the city’s preeminent Chinese-owned [photo] studio”, May’s was important Chinatown institution from its inception in the 1920s until the 1960s, photographically portraying, with great artistic skill, notable residents and community events as well as visiting Chinese officials and cultural celebrities, especially visiting Cantonese opera stars. It was operated by a husband and wife partnership; he had been a teenaged immigrant from Canton, while she was a third-generation San Franciscan, connected to one of the “six companies” which had dominated Chinatown since the Gold Rush. When the Shop finally closed after the death of the Lees, its vast archive of glass negatives and original prints was discarded, though local collectors managed to rescue about 1000 negatives and prints as well as some of the Studio’s photo equipment and fine hand-painted backdrops. These may be the only business records that survived.