Irene Poon’s alarming 1965 image of a sweet shop in San Francisco’s Chinatown exemplifies her knack for intimacy and surprise

The American photographer Irene Poon grew up in San Francisco’s Chinatown, where her father owned a store selling traditional herbal medicine. Graduating from art college in 1967, her work concentrated on the people and the community she lived among, glimpsing little moments of intimacy and surprise, telling their stories from the inside. Poon took this picture of her sister Virginia in 1965 in a sweet shop in the district. The composition seems drawn directly from feverish childhood imaginations – certainly, chocolate bars have rarely been cast in a more alarming light.

Poon, now 83, worked as a curator and art historian at the San Francisco State University art department for 45 years, helping to build its collection of 300,000 images stored on slides, and creating multiple exhibitions including landmark shows about the settlement of the American west and the role played by Asian communities in the gold rush and beyond. In 2001 she published an important guide to 25 formative Asian American artists who had inspired her photography, recognising several in print for the first time. Alongside her day job, Poon pursued her own work, continuing to document and reimagine the changing faces of Chinatown over the decades; those portraits, as here, often emerging from dramatically shadowed interiors.

American Photography is at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, 7 February-9 June; an accompanying book is published by Nai010 (€45) on 3 February