Benjamin Chinn, one of the few Chinese-American photographers to live and artfully document street scenes in San Francisco’s Chinatown, has died. He was 87.

Chinn died April 25 at the Kaiser Permanente San Francisco Medical Center, according to Newton Don, his nephew who is the executor of his estate. He was being treated for an infection and died of cardiac arrest.

Often photographing from the doorway of his home in Chinatown, Chinn began training his camera on his neighborhood in the late 1930s, but his most productive years were from 1947 to 1949, while he was studying at what is now the San Francisco Art Institute.

“Rarely has Chinatown been photographed skillfully, for the sake of art, by one of its own residents — by someone who knows Chinatown up close, as the site of home and work and day-to-day life,” Dennis Reed, dean of Fine, Performing and Media Arts at Los Angeles Valley College, wrote in the book “Asian Art in America.”

According to Reed, “Chinn’s photographs artfully explore the dignity of Chinatown’s residents, the differences between the generations of old and new Chinese, and the coexistence of interweaving of Chinese and American cultures.”

In the early 1950s, Chinn moved to Paris and photographed street life while studying art at the Academie Julian, where he took sculpture classes from Alberto Giacometti. He also took painting classes at Fernand Leger’s studio as well as geography and philosophy courses at the Sorbonne.

He found little work in Europe and returned to San Francisco in 1952. Chinn took a job with the U.S. Sixth Army Photo Lab in the Presidio of San Francisco, where he had a 31-year career, rising to the post of chief of photographic services and, later, chief of the training aids and services division.

For such an accomplished photographer, the work of the self-effacing Chinn had comparatively little public exposure during his lifetime. Minor White, a great photographer in his own right, included some of it in an exhibition called “Perceptions” at the San Francisco Museum of Art in 1954. It was not until 2003 that Chinn received a major solo exhibition at the Chinese Historical Society of San Francisco.

Chinn was born in San Francisco’s Chinatown on April 30, 1921. One of 12 children, he was just 10 when an older brother taught him some fundamentals of photography, and he took to it immediately. During World War II, he used his photography skills while serving as an aerial, ground and public relations photographer in the Army Air Forces stationed in Hawaii.