

Photographer Annie Ling has spent four years documenting different elements of everyday life in Manhattan's Chinatown, from the tiny spaces that many of its denizens call home to the hallways, exteriors, and rooftops of the neighborhood's ubiquitous, run-down tenements (h/t Metropolis). Her latest show, which wraps up at the Museum of Chinese in America this Sunday, includes more than 80 images from four series: Tenements, on the housing stock; Shut In, on house-bound senior citizens and the disabled community; A Floating Population, on the rootless members of the Chinese diaspora; and, perhaps most striking of all, 81 Bowery, a study of the residents of one building. There, dozens of people, mostly immigrants who work at construction sites or in restaurant kitchens, live in 64-square-foot cubiclesnot unlike Hong Kong's notorious partitioned rooms. A kind of modern-day Jacob Riis, Ling composes shots that are both illuminating from a documentary perspective and full of pathos from an emotional one.

· Annie Ling [official]

· A Floating Population [MOCA]

· Last Chance: 'A Floating Population' Explores New York's Chinatown [Metropolis]