Jarod Lew

Untitled (Picture of Mom)

Jarod Lew’s photographic series, In Between You and Your Shadow, visualizes his relationship to his mother and father, the concealment of history and historical record, confronting truth, memory, and recollections. In 2022, Lew was commissioned by Aperture in partnership with FUJIFILM to create a body of work examining his relationship with his mother after learning she was the fiancé of Vincent Chin. Chin was a Chinese American bludgeoned to death in a racially motivated assault by two white auto workers who mistook him as Japanese, in Highland Park, Michigan in the days before his wedding to Lew’s mother. Chin’s murder in 1982 is often cited as a major catalyst for Asian American organizing, involvement, and advocacy for civil rights and hate crime legislation. In the years following Chin’s death, Lew’s mother was often asked to be a subject of documentaries and interviews, yet evaded the spotlight and proximity to this historical event. As a way to question the telling of ‘official’ histories, his family’s and state-authored records, Lew turns his lens towards what is closest to him–his mother’s hands, his retired father in postman uniform, or photographs from the family archive–as intimate conduits of truth-telling. Lew uses strategies of obfuscation in his images, such as in Untitled (Picture of Mom), which depicts Lew’s mother’s hands holding and pointing to a passport photo of her younger self, as light cast through the blinds of a darkened room. This intimate photographic series offers intimate views of Lew’s parents who are subjects of unstable and untold stories, memories, and histories in his formation of personal and cultural identity.