Corky Lee

After graduating from Queens College, Lee began working as a community organizer at the Two Bridges Neighborhood Council in Manhattan's Chinatown neighborhood. Here, he educated immigrants on their rights in their new country and connected elderly members of the community with social services. This time was also a crucial developmental period for his photographic activism. Lee took particular notice of the poor and unsafe housing conditions common for many in his community and began documenting the daily lives of those around him through photography. This became part of a larger fight for tenant rights, which were increasingly jeapordized as large corporations continued to purchase and seal-off buildings in the area. Lee's work documented many key events in Asian American political history. Lee's first major published photograph was his 1975 photograph of a Chinese American man named Peter Yew being beaten by NYPD officers, featured in the New York Post. In April of 1975, Yew had witnessed a 15-year-old girl begin beaten by police officers at a traffic stop. When he intervened, he was beaten on the spot and arrested with charges of assault and resisting arrest. Lee's photo captured Yew, covered in blood, as he was being led away by the police officers from a crowd of angry observers. On the day Lee's picture was published, 20,000 people marched from Chinatown to City Hall protesting police brutality in response to the beating of Peter Yew. Lee himself was part of this march, documenting the protestor's march through Chinatown and New York City. Lee photographed protests after the 1982 murder of Vincent Chin in Michigan. Chin was a young Chinese American man living in Detroit who was killed by two recently laid-off auto workers, Ronald Ebens, a former superintendent at Chrysler Motors, and his stepson. The perpetrators attacked Chin, of Chinese descent, after mistaking him for being Japanese, as Japanese companies were blamed for the loss of American auto industry jobs. The two men were freed after facing no jail time, at which point protests erupted due to anger and discontent over the result of trial. Similar to the case of Peter Yew, Lee's photographs documented yet another event representative of the resistance against Asian American discrimination. One of Lee's most famous photos was taken after 9/11 and captured a Sikh man in Jersey City with an American flag draped over his shoulders in protest against the rising anti-Hindu violence. In 2014, Lee's career came full circle when he returned to scene of the famous Transcontinental railroad photo with 400 Chinese Americans from around the country to reshoot the photo and rectify the absence he had observed when he was young. Lee proclaimed himself the "undisputed unofficial Asian American Photographer Laureate". His photographs documented the daily lives of Asian Americans as well as historical moments in American history. Lee said his camera was a sword to combat racial injustice, to memorialize and make visible those who would otherwise be invisible by documenting the lives of minority-American cultures and communities. Han Zhang, writing in The New Yorker, described the cultural impact of Lee's work: "Lee was to Chinatown what Bill Cunningham was to the sartorialists of Manhattan, and what Roy DeCarava was to post-Renaissance Harlem." In essence, Zhang suggests that Lee was not only a photographer, but a visual historian for the Asian American community.

• Illustration — Corky Lee Way sign in Chinatown, NYC, named in 2023 A 2022 documentary, Dear Corky, about Lee's life and community activism was made by director Curtis Chin. On May 5, 2023, Lee was honored with a Google Doodle. On October 22, 2023, a street sign for Corky Lee Way was unveiled in New York's Chinatown, at the corner of Mott Street and Mosco Street. Streaming on PBS Passport, PHOTOGRAPHIC JUSTICE: The Corky Lee Story is a 2024 documentary feature about Corky Lee, "a loving tribute and valuable testament of one man's inexhaustible mission" (New York Sun) "to push mainstream media to include AAPI culture in the visual record of American history.... produc an astonishing archive of nearly a million compelling photographs." (All is Well Pictures). In 2024, a book titled Corky Lee's Asian America, was published, containing more than 200 photos taken over his career.

• Illustration — The unveiling of Corky Lee Way in 2023 • 1993, Photographer-Artist-in-Residence Award, Syracuse University • 1993, Special Recognition Award, Asian American Journalists Association (AAJA) • 2002, New York Press Association Award • 2002, Artist-In-Residence, New York University's Asian/Pacific/American Studies Program & Institute • 2008, Pioneer Award, Organization of Chinese Americans • 2009, Susan Ahn Award for Civil Rights and Social Justice for Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, Asian American Journalists Association • 2014, UC Regents Lecturer, University of California, Los Angeles Asian American Studies Center and Department & Luskin School of Public Affairs Urban Planning Department