Corky Lee's photographs helped Asian Americans see themselves. RIP

January 30, 2021 8:07 AM

Corky Lee was one of the few chroniclers of Asian America in the US during some of its most significant eras - from the sixties, seventies, up through the nineties. He died of COVID-19 at 73. In Junru Huang's short Vimeo film Not On the Menu about his life, he describes the moment he realized that photographs have a role in historical memory - when a picture commemorating the completion of the transcontinental railroad at Promontory Summit showed only the white workers, and not the many Chinese workers who contributed their blood and sweat.

In 2002, and then every year since 2014, Lee and Leland Wong, the great-grandson of a railroad laborer, have hosted a flash mob of sorts to re-create the tableau at Golden Spike National Historical Park, which preserves a stretch of the railroad and the spot where the last spike was installed. Lee — the self-described “undisputed unofficial Asian American photographer laureate” — has taken pictures of Chinese workers’ descendants and other Asian American supporters in front of the locomotives and a natural formation now known as the Chinese Arch because of its location near a former Chinese work camp. He characterizes these works as acts of “photographic justice.”

His first photo, sold to the New York Post in 1975, was of an arrest of a bloodied Chinese American during a police brutality protest.

He did not limit his work to chronicling Chinese America. One of his most iconic photos was of a Sikh American wrapped in the US flag during a vigil after 9/11.

“Anything that happens in the lives of Chinese-Americans, Japanese-Americans, Korean-Americans, Indian-Americans, Pakistani-Americans, Sri Lankan-Americans, Hmong-Americans, Thai-Americans, Cambodian-Americans, Burmese-Americans, Filipino-Americans, Malaysian-Americans, Hawaiians and other Asian-Pacific Americans is Corky Lee’s business.”

posted by toastyk (14 comments total)

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posted by Songdog at 8:44 AM on January 30, 2021

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posted by oceanjesse at 9:01 AM on January 30, 2021

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posted by chris24 at 10:59 AM on January 30, 2021

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posted by homerica at 11:46 AM on January 30, 2021

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posted by LobsterMitten at 12:41 PM on January 30, 2021

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posted by ChuraChura at 2:15 PM on January 30, 2021

A sad loss.

I used up all my NYT articles so I went looking for other photos by him, and found this untitled photo on the Light Work website page for Corky Lee:

In this picture, a huge sign for a diamond store at one entrance to Chinatown provided him with the perfect backdrop to place a Chinese woman costumed and posing as the Statue of Liberty. A street sign locates the scene on the Bowery, 'the street of homeless men,' and provides another layer of irony within the humor of the image. The diverse locations that appear in his photographs let us know that he is never very far from his camera. Like a reporter with a single client and determined sense of purpose, Lee offers us a point of view about the life and times of Asian American that is compacted with familiarity and tempered with knowledge.

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posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 3:22 PM on January 30, 2021 [5 favorites]

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posted by mustard seeds at 4:55 PM on January 30, 2021

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Thanks for posting. Archive links to the 9/11 vigil photo: Internet Archive, archive.today.
posted by XMLicious at 5:08 PM on January 30, 2021 [1 favorite]

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posted by Sockpuppet Liberation Front at 6:30 PM on January 30, 2021

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posted by ourobouros at 6:43 PM on January 30, 2021

Reading more about Lee now in the second below the fold OP link (archive), he evidently talked about being inspired by the intentional omission of immigrant railroad workers from the Sye Yup / Siyi region of Kwangtung / Guangdong from the Golden Spike transcontinental railroad photo.

I learned about Sye Yup Americans from the television series Hell on Wheels, set in the 19th century US, wherein Angela Zhou, Tzi Ma, Byron Mann, Jennifer Lim, Henry Kwok and others played Sye Yup people; of what ethnicities, I'm not sure (though I assume the depiction was accurate enough for someone more familiar with Chinese languages and cultures to figure it out). Though their characters don't show up in the Fanfare/IMDB banner image for the show...
posted by Sockpuppet Liberation Front at 7:28 PM on January 30, 2021 [1 favorite]

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posted by paimapi at 8:00 PM on January 30, 2021

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posted by later, paladudes at 5:55 PM on January 31, 2021