Photojournalism at its best will do what the dedication of this book promises. It will afford recognition, respect, and equality to the subjects it presents. In this remarkably thorough and beautifully rendered new coffee table book from Penguin Random House, the life and legacy of photographer Corky Lee is on full display, Hua Hsu remarks, in his introduction, about the range and breadth of Lee’s work, going from the tight focus of Manhattan’s Chinatown to the diverse spectrum of Asian experience and lives throughout the United States. “The Asian American community remains an unfinished project,” Hsu notes.
“But for Corky, the work that remained was a reason for hope, not despair.”
The reader looking for powerful images in this book will not be disappointed. There’s the black and white Lion parade featured on the cover, and an unforgettable shot of a September 15, 2001 candlelight vigil in NYC. Writer Vivel Bald sets the scene. A Sikh man in his twenties draws the viewer’s eyes. He is draped in a full-sized American flag. “His look is grave but, at the same time, weary.” On our right (his left) is a pre-teen Sikh girl. “One senses weariness here, too, but there’s a sharpness-even a hardness- in her young eyes.” Bard notes the power of this photo rests in the juxtaposition of the composition. Here are several Sikh men, and one girl, strong and determined and mournful in a sea of American flags. The spectrum of photos during and in the wake of 9/11 in this book is undeniably powerful: Ground Zero viewed from the west, a woman sitting with grieving parents at a photo display table of their lost son translates a letter for them from English to Korean, devastated unemployed service workers rallying for extended health benefits, and an elderly restaurant owner flanked by employees and a CUNY law graduate as he fills out a business loan to stay in business.
Lee was primarily a social photographer, not a practitioner of haute art or commercial photography, though as we see deeper in the book he’s as polished and composed as anybody when the situation warrants. We see the strength of his reporting in every image: a group of Asian Columbia University students demanding the creation of an ethnic studies program, hunger strikes to protest labor conditions, calls for immigrant rights put on by Asian Americans for Equality and the Chinatown planning council. What’s most interesting here is that while the hairstyles and wardrobe might be different, the sentiments remain the same. Corky Lee is a witness to all of this, and the results are immeasurably important.
While being at the right place at the right time is always the hallmark of a great journalist, Lee is not a point and shoot photographer. He reflects here in the importance of composition in an especially powerful 2011 image of two women walking past some discarded sewing machines in Chinatown:
“To most people it was nothing significant….I realized that the machines were being moved out because the factory was closing…The backstory of these eight sewing machines lying out there is the decline of Chinatown’s manufacturing industry and the end of an era. This is the kind of story I like to tell.”
It’s this allegiance to storytelling that makes Lee’s work, and this testament to it, so compelling. He was a social justice warrior from his photographer superhero origin story in the 1970’s and that unabashed activism stayed with him. Lee’s brother John writes: “Corky was a product of his time, but he was also, more directly, a product of his family.” Born in 1947 to parents who were all too aware of internment camps and Chinese Cold War Red Scares, they feared the repercussions of Asian American activism. Lee’s marriage in 1974 until his wife’s death in 2001 was “…as intense and pure as it was private.” Some of the NYC Chinatown images Lee captures in the chapter on the 1970’s could be interchangeable with Boston’s Chinatown, tall tenement buildings with dangerous fire escape stairs crawling up the sides to the roof. Health fair clinics and Mongolian dances take place in the park. The diversity of Asian life in NYC’s Chinatown is on dazzling display.
This book is filled with glowing images that reflect a time long gone. In 1971, celebrating the twenty-second anniversary of the PRC, Black Panther founding members spoke in a storefront under a huge banner of Chairman Mao. The location of the hosting storefront was that of I Wor Kuen (IWK) a Maoist group located on the outskirts of Chinatown, beneath the shadow of the Manhattan Bridge. The photo plays with orange, red, and shadows, giving a sense of revolution, solidarity, and the determination of two groups finding common ground in a country that was quickly becoming alien to all but the white establishment. On May 12, 1975, a bloodied Peter Yew is held by two police as he faces a baton-holding third officer in a street scene standoff. The photo runs in that day’s New York Post.In 1974, Muhammad Ali visits Chinatown and is greeted by a beaming Man Bun Lee, president of the CCBA (Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association.) In 1976, a woman labors in a factory, her young daughter by her side. Seven years later, the ILGWU (International Ladies Garment Workers Union) opens a daycare center.
What makes this book so special is that it affords Corky Lee the opportunity to live again in these pages. He is a witness to history and he’s also a committed activist. Take the 1982 photo of Bill Kochiyama as he testifies at a Congressional hearing on Japanese American internment during World War II. Turn the page and there are Gordon Hirabayashi and Fred Korematsu, whose landmark Supreme Court cases upheld the military’s right to detain citizens in such a way during times of war. We are reminded that in 1983, the SJC vacated Korematsu’s original conviction but did not repudiate the original ruling until 2018, thirteen years after his death at the age of eighty-six.
The list of names and events captured by Lee’s camera are essential to human rights history. There’s a haunting 1983 image of Vincent Chin’s mother at a vigil a year after her son’s brutal murder at the hands of two laid off white Detroit auto workers. She’s captured in the photo with her niece Betty Li. The reader wonders if either woman could have imagined these vigils still having to take place forty years later. Lee captures beauty queens and boxers, pool sharks, his own wife and mother-in-law at their family laundry. To say the full mosaic of Asian life is captured in these pages would be a major understatement.
The Asian Arts scene, and the importance of representation, also matters here. It’s the elegance and portraiture in the shots of boxers, hip hop dancers, folk dancers, fan dancers and beauty queens that shows the artistic grace of Lee’s photographic perspective. These are stunning pictures. We see them all and manage to walk through every element of Chinatown and Asian life with Corky Lee. The editors wisely leave one of the best for last. It’s Lee’s iconic Promontory Summit photograph, his successful 2014 effort to right the wrongs that were perpetrated in Andrew J. Russell’s 1869 “East and West Shaking Hands at Laying Last Rail,” a staged attempt to represent the end of the Transcontinental Railroad in Utah.
The 1869 photo had only one Chinese person in frame, front and center but face blurred due to his movement. Blur a man’s face, and the visual evidence of so many of his Chinese people and their involvement in creating the railroad is lost to history. Gordon K. Chang reflects on the significance of Lee’s 2014 photo:
“[It] provokes complex, even contradictory feelings…a range of sentiments in the diverse crowd, anger against the past insult but also joy in setting the record straight. It’s a celebration of shared community and identity, but it also expresses our ambivalence in seeking inclusion in an imperial enterprise.”
Corky Lee died of Covid in 2021. This book, and the PBS film Photographic Justice: The Corky Lee Story, are vivid and tangible reminders that the work of an activist photojournalist is never finished. Records are set straight and absolution can be gained as time marches on, but the most important job of a photographer, journalist, or anybody with an activist spirit is to live long, keep your eyes/ears/heart open, and tell the story as it’s happening.
