Corky Lee was affectionately known as the “winner of the unofficial photographer of America”. Assembled by his family and friends after his premature death of Covid-19, Corky Lee Asian America: fifty years of photographic justice (2024) is, in substance, a retrospective, presenting his works in an almost chronological order, interspersed with tests of relatives, colleagues and even subjects of his images.
Lee began to photograph in the 1970s while working as a young community activist in the Chinese New York district. Unsurprisingly, the book is, in a dimension, an ode to the neighborhood, not as a tourist destination but as a living community and a home of social justice movements. From the start, Lee's reasons were social. He took pictures of everything and everyone, everyday people dancing, lifting weights or simply standing outside their favorite restaurants, with Asian American icons like Yuri Kochiyama and Yo-Yo MA.
But what he liked to photograph more than anything was social justice in action. He captured, among other times, incidents of police brutality, the pain of the South Asian community after September 11 and the creeping propagation of hate crimes against Asians during COVID-19. The result in Corky Lee Asian America is an amazing overview of the fight for racial justice during the last half century – one of many Americans have not seen. The mainstream sources of information have not captured the conflicts or protests of the owner-tenant of Chinatown for a health center in the neighborhood, as Lee did. He did not focus on the American Asian opposition to the Vietnam War, as Lee did in a particularly striking photo of the activist Grace Lee Boggs holding a megaphone during a rally in front of the Washington monument.
His work was not just photojournalism but also art in its own right. His favorite of his own works was a revision of the history of Andrew Russell 1869 Photograph of the completion of the transcontinental railwayThis leaves aside the Chinese workers who have built most of the Western railways. In its 2014 revision, Lee gathered 250 Americans of Asian origin of all ages, including the descendants of the original railways, at Promontory Point de l'Utah; They stand together before two trains lean, their expressions ranging from morose to neutral to joyful while the sparse landscape of the large basin extends behind them.
Readers could naturally criticize the book to focus on American Chinese history in the biggest Asian story, especially while boasting of such a radical title. But although Lee started to photograph what he knew – he once said to his loved ones that Chinatown was “part of (his) soul” – he worked to widen his goal. He knew, as his social militant colleagues did, that the fate of different Asian American groups is linked. He photographed Japanese Americans celebrating their Buddhist Obon festival, the Flores de Mayo festival of the American Philippine Community, the Americans Sikhs organizing a candle vigil in New York after September 11 and many other examples of a diversified Asian America.
Some may also wonder if the book is a little too didactic. Publishers provide an extended sociohistoric context, which sometimes appears to be dry, as the discussion on the census of the United States in the introduction of the photographs of Lee from the 80s and 1990s. However, this educational pension resonates with Lee's objectives: he was, as his friend writes, Professor Mae Ngai, a “Militant Photograph”. People of Asian origin have lived in this country for almost as long as it existed, and yet the main American Asian condition is always invisibility – Corky Lee Asian America renders them visible.
Corky Lee Asian America: fifty years of photographic justice (2024), edited by Chee Wang Ng and Mae Ngai and published by Crown publishing groupis available for online purchase and bookstores.
