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改色
改色 (gaisè), to correct color: this was what my father did most days and most nights. This was the skill he learned in Hong Kong after escaping from a gulag during the Cultural Revolution, while waiting for his papers so he could emigrate to Canada. This was what he did after the failure of the Shangri La, a Chinese restaurant he ran in Whitehorse in the 1970s. He was gifted at this darkroom work (so I am told) and caught a lucky break when he got a job as a darkroom technician with the audio-visual department of the Government of Alberta, where he worked for over fifteen years. He lost his job and became permanently unemployed during the twin calamities (in my household at least) that were the massive job cuts engineered by the provincial government of the time, and the rise of digital photography. But for many years it was his day job, and at night my uncle would call and ask him to come over to his place to 改色, to correct color. My uncle owned a small grocery store in Edmonton, Alberta, with a professional photography studio in the back. The studio was both a business and a passion for my uncle, who mostly did family photographs and weddings. No matter their circumstances, people still wanted their pictures taken. He was almost always busy with this work, and my aunt and my cousins ran the grocery store out front. Almost every night after dinner, my dad would get a call and head over to my uncle's darkroom to help process and print photographs. My brother and I often went along and played or helped out in the store until my dad was done. I was not permitted into the darkroom, but I knew it was a special, magical place of craft and artistry. This work was a part of the daily rhythm of my life, and an essential part of my family life and livelihood. Deborah Willis argues for "photography as biography" in her demand for the critical work of "visualizing memory" and portraying black lives (22). Thinking about race and photography has brought me to this private history of perpetual proximity to the magic of the darkroom, and to the...