Faded Photographs Help Tell Story of L.A.’s Ethnic Diversity : Archives: Asian-Americans share family pictures as part of a Central Library project on the city’s cultural history.

Susan Ahn dropped her head into one open palm and said nothing.

For several seconds, maybe even a minute, she appeared to be sleeping. But she was trying hard to remember.

As if flipping the pages of a history book, Ahn sifted through her memory to try to put a date to the faded black-and-white photo of a young woman with black hair and a wide smile. She easily recognized herself in the photo, even if others could not.

Now if only she could remember when it was taken.

“1945,” she finally said as a group of young historians wrote down every word. “Now it’s coming back to me.”

There was a lot of remembering Saturday as Asian-Americans, mostly Korean-Americans, gathered to contribute timeworn but valuable snapshots to a citywide project known as “Shades of Los Angeles.”

Carolyn Kozo, the city’s senior photo collection librarian, said the idea is to illustrate the historic, political and cultural contributions of Southern California’s ethnic communities from 1860 to 1960.

“Photographs are a common denominator,” said Kozo, who developed the idea after discovering that the Central Library’s collection of 2.5 million photographs had few images documenting the city’s ethnic heritage. “They help us to discover that we’re really alike in many ways.”

The project has already reproduced hundreds of photographs from the family archives of the city’s African-American and Latino residents.

On Saturday, more than a dozen Asian-American families came to a television studio near Koreatown to share their memories with the rest of Los Angeles. Some brought their photos in shopping bags and cardboard boxes. Others, such as Ahn, brought stacks of family photo albums.

Ahn’s father, Dosan Ahn Chang Ho, was a leader of the movement to free Korea from Japanese rule in the years after the 1910 occupation. He died in 1938 after six years of imprisonment, she said--nearly a decade before Korea was liberated.

Ahn became the first Korean-American to join the Navy and its first woman gunnery officer.

“I thought the only way to fight for the cause was to join the Navy and fight the Japanese,” she said, flipping through a tattered photo album. “That is what my father taught me.”

The pages of some albums were falling apart, their pages wrinkled with time. Many pictures were so faded and yellowed that librarians said they could not be reproduced.

Although some photo collections had been in families for generations, Ildong C. Park put an album together Friday night chronicling her mother’s life. Her mother, Young Son Choo Chey, was born in what is now South Korea at the turn of the century. She made her way to Ohio, where she attended high school and earned a sociology degree from Oberlin College.

Park brought pictures of her mother as a girl and young woman.

There was a photo of the young woman balancing on a railroad track. In another, she was winding up to throw a snowball. Yet another was a group shot of her mother and other college students who belonged to a club for foreigners.

“Before she passed away,” Park said, “I wanted to show these pictures to someone.”

After her mother and father met in New York and married in 1930, the couple returned to Korea, intending to stay two years.

Because the Japanese occupiers tightened their grip, the couple ended up staying 20 years. Their daughter was born there.

“They took my mother’s recipes because they thought they were in code,” said Park, recalling weekly visits by detectives to her childhood home. “This is a sad story of that time. I still see these images in my head. You never forget those things.”