Corky Lee ‘Was Chinatown to Me’

By Ming Lin and Alexandra Tatarsky

Anyone who knew Corky Lee will tell you that he seemed to know everyone and be everywhere. Whether he was at a Dragon Boat Festival in Queens or among a throng of protesters in Chinatown, the 73-year-old photographer and activist could be found snapping pictures and chatting eagerly with the other participants. Once he caught wind of your interests, he would rattle off a list of everyone you needed to speak to and offer to share their contacts, nonchalantly handing you a business card that designated him “the Undisputed Unofficial Asian American Photographer Laureate.” He might also hand you a flyer promoting an Asian American event — often one of his own, such as the Sunday film series he ran out of the First Baptist Church on Pell Street. It was said that Corky Lee had the best Rolodex in town.

Over more than four decades of photography, Lee also created a definitive body of work capturing Asian American life — from the intimate moments of a restaurant worker’s off hours to the grandeur of collective movement-building. He made his life a ceaseless act of creative intervention in a history shaped by erasure. Before his death on January 27 of complications from COVID-19, the self-proclaimed “ABC from NYC” (ABC stands for American-born Chinese) spoke of his camera as a sword that he used to pursue “photographic justice” by documenting the overlooked role that Asian Americans played across the U.S. His pictures — joyous, banal, specific, upsetting, uplifting — were close studies and celebrations of the complexities of community...READ MORE

A protest against police brutality after Peter Yew’s beating in 1975. Photo: Corky Lee