Photographic Justice: The Corky Lee Story (All Is Well Pictures, Good Docs, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Tuesday, May 28) I watched a couple of intriguing TV shows on KPBS: Photographic Justice: The Corky Lee Story and a Frontline episode with the awkward title, “Netanyahu, America and the Road to War in Gaza.” Photographic Justice was a fascinating vest-pocket (a one-hour running time) documentary on Asian-American photographer Corky Lee, born September 5, 1947 in Queens, New York (so he was just a year younger than Queens’s most famous home-boy these days, Donald Trump). His parents ran a Chinese laundry and trained Lee to do the same, but he wanted to study law until he got sidetracked into an artistic career. Lee’s inspiration was a photograph of the Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroads meeting at Promontory Summit, Utah on May 10, 1869 by photographer Andrew Russell, but it’s been criticized – both at the time and since – for having cropped out just about all the Chinese workers and leaving just a sea of white faces on the front. (More recent researchers have traced two Chinese people in the crowd in Russell’s photo.) Having learned in school that the transcontinental railroad was largely built by Chinese workers, Lee carefully examined the photo with a magnifying glass and gradually realized that the reason no one in the photo looked like him was because the picture had been deliberately staged to eliminate the Chinese who actually built the damned thing. Working with borrowed cameras until he could afford equipment of his own, Lee started taking pictures of Asian-American community events and political protests just to document how people who looked more or less like him were working to change the world.

He achieved success when he took a photo of a young Asian-American protester, Peter Yew, being beaten by New York police, and after the New York Times and the Daily News both turned him down – they said they’d had their own photographers at the demonstration and they hadn’t seen anything like that – he finally placed the photo with the New York Post (in its pre-Rupert Murdoch days before it became a Right-wing propaganda sheet). The Post printed Lee’s photo on the front page, and on the day it came out 20,000 people marched from Chinatown to City Hall to protest the assault on Yew. In 1982 Lee went to Detroit to cover the unrest in the city’s Asian communities following the lynching of Vincent Chin, a young Chinese-American who was beaten to death by two unemployed auto workers who mistook him for Japanese and assaulted him because they were angry at how they’d lost their jobs, allegedly due to competition from Japanese automakers. Lee was married to another Chinese-American, Margaret Dea, until her death from breast cancer in 2001, though later in life he lived with a younger woman, also Chinese-American and also a photographer, who became a protégée as well as a life partner. Lee himself died on January 27, 2021 of COVID-19, which his friends believe he contracted while covering demonstrations denouncing then-President Donald Trump for having sparked a wave of violence against Asian-Americans with his references to the pandemic as the “Chinese virus” and “Kung Flu.” It’s an indication of how much social impact a man I’d never heard of before could have in a quiet, low-keyed way – people recognized him at virtually all the Asian community events in New York – and even today his photos are widely exhibited and Not on the Menu, the self-published book he produced, collecting his images as well as his written comments on them, has been republished and expanded under the title Corky Lee’s Asian America.