Photographer Wing Young Huie makes pictures of everyday Minnesota life available to everyone

If you’ve walked down Lake Street in Minneapolis, chances are you’ve heard of 2018 McKnight Distinguished Artist winner Wing Young Huie. His project “Lake Street, U.S.A.” in 2000 consisted of 675 photographs that he installed along a six-mile stretch of that street with the help of many volunteers.

That project is an example of how Huie has built a career around large-scale photography projects that not only capture community members, but directly involve them.

To preserve the life of his carefully yet speedily crafted pictures, he and the Minnesota Historical Society will archive 5,000 photographs in the MNHS’ Gale Family Library. Over the next five years, they will all become accessible in MNHS’ Collections Online database.

“It’s been thrilling and an honor,” Huie said. “My goal in the last several years at least has been to figure out how to get my work out into the world in a way that’s accessible, and then also to digitize and to finally catalog it.”

The opportunity to archive his work at MNHS came about naturally as Huie started contemplating his 45-year career. MNHS owns Huie’s photograph “Frogtown Series #114, Basketball,” a work acquired by the society’s former curator of art, Brian Szott.

“At this point in my career, I thought about: What will I do with my photographs?” Huie said. Szott suggested that he archive his photographs with the Historical Society.

After Szott retired, Huie was introduced to MNHS Curator of Photography and Moving Images Jennifer Huebscher, and things have been moving forward ever since.

“I’m pretty old school,” he said. “I’ve got boxes everywhere with photographs, and in hard drives and I’ve been meaning to database them, but I had kind of put it off.”

The archiving process is “like a part-time to full-time project,” he said. He works on it not every day, but definitely every week.

Thus far, there are around 1,000 photographs available online, and the hard copy versions, all of which are 8 by 10 inches or 8 by 11.5 inches and housed in MNHS’ research rooms.

“We are attempting to hit all of his projects,” Huebscher said. “The main projects are ‘Lake Street, U.S.A.,’ the ‘University Avenue Project,’ and ‘Frogtown,’ but you’ve also got his ‘Looking for Asian America’ project and ‘Chineseness,’ and the other small projects here and there.”

Most of his photographs were shot on film. Huie didn’t buy a digital camera until 2010.

Going through 45 years of work isn’t the easiest task, particularly when it comes to deciding which photos to select.

“At first we thought we would outsource it, but once I started I thought, ‘No, I want to look at every single print,’” he said.

His first major project, “Frogtown,” shot between 1993 and 1995, is documentary but not in the strict sense of the word. He captured working-class white people, Southeast Asian immigrants, African Americans, Native Americans and Latino individuals of this neighborhood and got to know and connect with them in the process.

In true Wing-style, the exhibition for this project wasn’t in a gallery, but in an outdoor, grassy corner lot in the heart of Frogtown. He pinned 173 photographs to large Styrofoam panels and shrink-wrapped them in clear plastic. Anyone who wanted to could see the “Frogtown” project then.

He carries that same ethos with him for this archival project and is in the middle of year three.

Parsing through the photographs he selected back then versus what he wants to archive for the future has caused him to reflect on his whole career.

“For any artist, for anybody, how much time has to pass before you can look at your own work objectively?” he said.

Back then, when he shot the projects, the vibe was different.

“I had no time,” he said. “Lake Street was a huge project, and I basically produced it myself rather than writing a lot of grants and going into debt and so on, and then you figure out how many store windows and which photographs to use. You just pick the one that pops out at you.”