Mixed Race Studies

An Artist Discovers His Black Heritage Through Photography

VICE
2016-02-11

Beckett Mufson, Staff Writer

German-born photographer Zun Lee documents the special non-special moments of black family life.

In his late thirties, Zun Lee discovered that he was not the son of two Korean immigrants to Frankfurt, Germany, as he had believed for most of his life. He was the son of one Korean immigrant—his mother—and a black man he’s never met. He’s been struggling with this shift in identity ever since, most recently in the form of three documentary projects, Father Figure, Black Love Matters, and Fade Resistance. Each series examines an underrepresented facet of black culture, often actively fighting harmful stereotypes that Lee has encountered…

Read the entire article here.

In 2004, my mother and I were having an argument and she called me a “Black bastard.” And I’m like, even if you want to hurt my feelings, who says that? Call me stupid. call me whatever, but “Black bastard?” Where did that come from? So after a pregnant silence, she told me the story of how she met somebody just before she met the man I thought was my dad. She doesn’t really remember a whole lot about him; it was a short-lived relationship. But he was Black. African American. Of course, I was shocked. But I also had a sense of relief and affirmation. And while I was having a lot of questions—I wanted to know who this man was, I wanted some evidence—all these pieces just fell into place: why my lips were bigger, why my skin was darker, why I didn’t look like the rest of my family, and perhaps even why I gravitated to the people and things that I did. It just explained a lot of things that I had a hard time explaining to myself. And it made me feel like perhaps all the choices I had made were not necessarily mine to have made. Maybe in a strange way my biological father had been guiding me towards myself all along. —Zun Lee

Yaba Blay, (1)ne Drop: Shifting the Lens on Race, (Philadelphia: BLACKprint Press, 2013). 92-93.

A different portrait of black fatherhood

In Pictures
BBC News
2018-03-06

Zun Lee

Zun Lee was raised in Germany by Korean parents – but as an adult he discovered his real father was a black American with whom his mother had had a brief affair.

After this discovery, he began to explore fatherhood among black Americans.

Lee says the US media mainly portrays black fathers in one of two ways:

• the absent father, often portrayed as a “deadbeat”
• the traditional family patriarch, as seen in TV programmes such as The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air

And his project, on display at the Bronx Documentary Centre, in New York, aims for a more balanced and nuanced portrayal.

Read the entire article here.

The Digital Afterlife of Lost Family Photos

On Photography
The New York Times Magazine
2016-04-26

Teju Cole

The backs of found photos from the writer’s “Mrs. X” collection. Credit Jens Mortensen for The New York Times

The photographs were Polaroids, taken between the 1970s and the 2000s. Zun Lee bought them at flea markets, at garage sales or on eBay. Most of them depicted African-Americans: people wearing stylish clothes, relaxing in the yard, celebrating birthdays. A few depicted people in prison uniforms. All the photographs had somehow been separated from their original owners and had become what Lee calls “orphaned Polaroids.”

Found photographs have long been important to artists like Lee. Photos taken by amateurs can sometimes acquire new value on account of their uniqueness, their age or simply the knowledge that they were once meaningful to a stranger. As part of a group, they can evoke a collector’s sensibility or tell us something about a historical period in a way professional photographs might not. For Lee, collecting found photographs of African-­Americans — a project he called “Fade Resistance” — had an additional and deeply personal meaning.

Lee was raised in Germany by Korean parents. In his 30s, his mother told him that the man who raised him was not his biological father. But because her relationship with that man, who was black, had been fleeting, she refused to tell her son more about him. This revelation, at once momentous and limited, changed Lee’s life. To make sense of his personal loss, and to explore his connectedness to black America, he took up photography. I became friends with Lee around the time he began making pictures of black fathers and their children in the Bronx and elsewhere; that project led to a book, “Father Figure,” for which I wrote a preface. Later, Lee began to collect the Polaroids — thousands of them — that ended up in “Fade Resistance.”…

Read the entire article here.

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.

Rescuing Discarded Images of Everyday Black Life

The New York Times
2015-10-20

David Gonzalez, Side Street Columnist

Who throws away family photos? How do faded, blurry squares that chronicled weddings, ballgames and goofy moments at home end up abandoned, tossed to the curb or in boxes bought sight unseen at storage auctions?

Zun Lee has been wondering about this ever since he stumbled upon a dozen Polaroids scattered on a Detroit sidewalk. He had gone to Motown as part of his work on “Father Figure,” his book about African-American fatherhood. The sight of those images — children playing in a yard — stopped him. He asked around, but no one knew who was in the pictures. And while someone didn’t want these images, Mr. Lee did: They showed an ordinary beauty. Their fate hinted at hard times. Yet, in a frozen moment, they showed their subjects with love.

Mr. Lee was hooked. He started to haunt flea markets, yard sales and eBay in search of more of these images, to the point that he now has some 3,500 of them, ranging from the 1970s through the 2000s. Taken in a time before Instagram or Everyday Black America, they accomplish the same thing: to show African-American life as it was lived…

…The idea itself is also, for him, a response to how African-American communities have been depicted, something he cares about as the son of a Korean mother and an African-American father. Tired of the conventional wisdom that African-American fathers were absent, he set out to show a contrary reality. Similarly, his interest in collecting family pictures and turning them into a project was a response to “Found Pictures in Detroit,” a project and book by two Italian photographers who also showcased discarded images, with many of them showing crime scenes, suspects and victims…

Read the entire article and view the slide show here.

Defying the Stereotype of the Broken Black Family

The New Yorker
2015-10-12

Lucy McKeon

For his series “Father Figure,” begun in 2011, the photographer Zun Lee created quiet and tender portraits of black fathers with their children: one kisses the tiny hand of his baby while riding the subway; another goofs around at bedtime, his daughter’s feet pressed up against his cheek. The project was, in part, a response to Lee’s own personal history: he grew up, in Frankfurt, Germany, nurtured by African-American military families who were stationed there; in his thirties, he discovered that his biological father was not the Korean dad he’d grown up with but a black man he’d never met. “Father Figure” is an homage to the surrogate black father figures he’d found growing up, and an exploration of alternatives to the stereotype of the black absentee father.

Lee’s latest project, the found-photo series “Fade Resistance,” continues to challenge racist assumptions of black family dysfunction, this time with Lee acting not as a photographer but as a curator…

Read the entire article and view the photographs here.

Zun Lee’s Polaroid Archive Preserves African-American Self-Representation

Photo District News
2015-08-26

Holly Hughes

Photographer Zun Lee is dedicated to countering stereotypical, often negative views of the African-American family. While he was working on Father Figure, his book about African-American fathers, he stumbled on some old Polaroids that appeared to have fallen from a family photo album. He was intrigued to see how the Polaroids —”the Instagrams of their day,” he calls them — reflected “the way black people saw themselves in private spaces and in ways not intended to be seen, or judged, by others.” By searching yard sales and e-Bay, Lee has amassed 3,000 of these now “orphaned” mementoes and recently began posting them on a Tumbler and an Instagram feed named “Fade Resistance.” After winning a Magnum Foundation Fellowship last week, Lee now plans to develop his Fade Resistance collection into an interactive digital archive that will allow the public and collaborators from other disciplines to add their own stories, videos and images. His long-term goal, he says, is “to encourage new ways of understanding black identity and representation in today’s world.”…

Read the entire article here.

Exhibition: Zun Lee, Father Figure: Exploring Alternate Notions of Black Fatherhood

The Jefferson School African American Heritage Center
Contemporary Gallery
233 4th Street, NW
Charlottesville, Virginia 22903
2015-06-09 through 2015-08-29

Gallery Hours: Tuesday–Friday, 12:00-18:00; Saturday, 10:00-15:00

Through intimate black-and-white frames, the viewer gains access to often-overlooked moments in the lives of African American men whom Lee has worked with since 2011. Lee brings into focus what pervasive father absence stereotypes have distorted – black men who define parental presence on their own terms and whose masculinity is humanized, not viewed with suspicion. Using his struggle with father absence as inspiration, Lee examines a complex subject matter with profound vulnerability, resulting in a richly woven narrative that is deceptively simple yet multidimensional.

For Father Figure, Zun Lee used his personal journey of discovery and identity formation to examine manifestations of black fatherhood largely ignored by mainstream media. The book has been shortlisted for the Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards and named a winner in the Photo Books category of the 2015 PDN Photo Annual competition.

Zun Lee is an award-winning photographer from Toronto, Canada who was named onto PDN’s 30 List in 2014. His visual storytelling has been widely featured in The New York Times and other publications..

Zun Lee, Father Figure: Exploring Alternate Notions of Black Fatherhood is presented in partnership with the LOOK3 Festival of the Photograph and is made possible through the generous support of the Blue Moon Fund, and Hampton Inn and Suites.

For more information, click here.

Snap! Space presents Zun Lee

Snap! Orlando
1013 E. Colonial Drive
Orlando, Florida 32803
Saturday, October 25, 2014 14:00-16:00 EDT (Local Time)

Join us for an afternoon artist talk and book signing with photographer Zun Lee.

Zun will be joining us from Toronto and discuss his series ‘Father Figure’ and sign copies of his newly released book Father Figure – Exploring Alternate Notions of Black Fatherhood (September 19, 2014.) Zun’s book release party at the Bronx Documentary Center was so highly anticipated that crowds lined the street surrounding the building around the block to get in. This afternoon at Snap! Space is not to be missed.

Over the course of three years photographer Zun Lee has masterfully attempted to change the perception of the African American father through the lens of his camera. This collection of photographs in the new book is an immersive approach to his remarkable photo documentary project. “Scenes that can stand on their own and humanize the black experience without demanding perfection or respectability,” says Lee were filmed with so much care—vivid images of loving parental relationships that are able to engross any spectator into a family story that is tough to believe. An added revelation: the photographer himself grew up feeling a sense of loss due to his own father’s choice to abandon his family.

Lee, a Toronto-based physician and now self-described street photographer, was born in Germany to what he thought was both a Korean mother and father. As a boy he learned the truth: his black father left his mother upon learning she was pregnant. Lee’s search for compassion led him to families in urban areas of Chicago, New York City, and home to Toronto. Says Lee: “There’s been considerable backlash and confusion regarding why black fatherhood stereotypes are a problem at all, why the special focus on only black fathers, and people who simply refuse to believe that black men can be capable, affectionate loving fathers, period. I appreciate both sides of the collective commentary, because it exemplifies why these images and a broader conversation are needed.”

For more information, click here.