Why the internet fell for a Chinatown passport photographer

A few months ago, someone stole Bolton Brown’s gym bag from his locker. His favorite jacket was gone. So were his keys — and his passport. With a trip to Italy coming up, he needed a new one. This, of course, meant a new photo.

So Brown went where he’d gone five years before: Eliz Digital, a small, cash-only film shop in Chinatown, wedged between a hair salon and a food market. It was quick, like the first time, Brown said. The woman behind the camera, Chunika Kesh, is “pretty down to business. Straightforward. Just tells you where to sit, tells you where to look.”

A few minutes and $25 later, Brown had his portrait. He posted it to X — “the best portrait photographer in ny is the chinese passport photo lady on elizabeth lol” — and now more than 1.1 million people have seen the photo online.

Brown’s viral post brought fresh interest to Eliz Digital, but it’s long been a quiet favorite among New York’s analog set.

On TikTok, “film girlies” post “get my film developed with me” videos as they weave through Chinatown’s crowded sidewalks and into the shop. On Reddit, it’s a default answer to anyone asking where to develop film. And X has been full of love letters to Eliz Digital for years.

“I don’t get it,” Brown told Gothamist. “But it looks really good every time.”

He thought it might have something to do with how Kesh asks her subjects to look under the lens — “which I guess does something with eye contact. I don't know.”

Whatever it is, the internet agrees. Soon after Brown posted, other accounts started sharing their own portraits, taken at the same shop.

“Eliz digital is the f---ing truth,” user @frajankie wrote. From @adrnvic: “passport appt tomorrow, eliz digital came thruuuuuu.”

Kesh is not on social media, so she missed the latest wave of attention. What she didn’t miss was the sudden rush of people coming in for passport photos. A few of them mentioned the posts. She’d gone viral and just kept working.

“That was a very nice surprise,” Kesh said. She’s a petite woman, soft spoken and not particularly prone to hyperbole.

Eliz Digital is a shoebox of a store located on Elizabeth Street. It’s been around for 35 years – 25 in its current spot. There’s a sense it hasn’t changed much — “a time portal back to the ’80s or ’90s,” is how customer Teen Sheng described it. Mirrors on either wall catch the neon glow of the “30 MIN PHOTO” sign hanging in the front windows. The glass counter holds simple gold and silver frames and empty photo albums, the kind you might find in your grandmother’s attic. Boxes of prints crowd the floor.

On a recent Sunday afternoon, Kesh moved between customers. She took print orders while plying the backsides off disposable cameras with a screwdriver and directing people to her portrait studio at the far end of the shop’s counter.

Her setup, like the store itself, is modest: a small white chair against a plain white wall. She shoots with an older DSLR camera, the flash topped with a diffuser to help spread the light. A few Styrofoam boards help soften the shadows further. Nearby, she keeps a spray bottle and comb for last-minute touch-ups.

When someone sits in the chair, she gives them small cues. “Tilt your head.” “Roll your shoulders back.” “Relax.”

After a few shots, Kesh leans over the counter to review them with the customer, consulting on which she thinks is best.

“ I think the whole experience is just a manifestation of someone who has a really good talent for taking portraits of people,” Emma Hartsfield said. She had seen Brown’s photo and decided to get one herself. “ She's really perfected the craft, and you can tell she is very deliberate and knows what she's doing but makes it look effortless.”

Hartsfield hadn’t had a portrait taken since at least 2021, she said. There was something nice, she said, about being able to walk into a random shop in Chinatown and get a photograph made. “The one I just had from her probably isn't even my favorite picture of myself,” she said, “But I think it captures like this era of my life that I'm in really well because it is just a white background and then me. It's just very clever.”

Kesh does not consider herself a professional photographer, though she’s long lost count of the number of passport photos she’s taken. (On the recent Sunday, she shot five in less than an hour.) She’s not entirely sure what makes her images stand out. Maybe, she said, it’s their simplicity, part of a broader return to physical life. “I think people like to go to organic stuff. They don’t want to change too much. They don’t want [me] to make them look too pretty or whatever, just as it is, more real — and maybe a better angle of themselves.”

Sheng, who got his photograph taken before Brown’s went viral, thinks it’s the care she brings.

“You feel like you’re modeling,” he said. “She just really seems to enjoy trying to take a nice shot of you. … Even my mother-in-law was like, ‘You look very handsome in this photo.’”

It was around the pandemic that Kesh noticed a new kind crowd coming in. She thinks it’s partly the resurgence of film photography — one market research firm estimates more than 20 million rolls were sold globally in 2023, up 15% from the year before — and partly the changes in the neighborhood itself.

It used to be that Eliz Digital mostly served the Chinatown community. For years, the shop was where people went to have portraits taken for immigration papers or to develop film to send back home. Kesh used to hand out small souvenir albums with a picture of the storefront on the cover, so new arrivals already knew the place before they ever walked through the door. But the share of residents identifying as Asian in Chinatown and the Lower East Side has been slowly but steadily falling, according to Census department reports.

Now, “newer, younger people” come in, Kesh said. Older regulars fade away as new photographers take their place. She watches them learn, tracking their progress through each roll. One guy came in after a friend gave him his first roll of film. He started carrying his camera everywhere. “He’s really passionate,” she said. “He took good photos in a short period of time.” Now he’s getting hired for shoots.

Kesh has seen plenty of people fall for film and for her portraits, too. She just lines up each shot the same way she always has — a white wall, a steady hand and a flash of light.