Corky Lee, Expanding the Lens One Photograph at a Time
Chinatown Mural Project mural by Peach Tao, Marissa Molina, and Karlin Chan in Chinatown NYC, made to honor Corky Lee’s life and work in 2022. Photo courtesy of Peach Tao.
Welcome to Humanizing History™! Every month, we feature a central theme. Each week, we dive into different areas of focus.
This month’s theme: Who’s Holding the Camera? Seeing the World Through Expanded Lenses
This week’s focus: Hidden History, a facts-based narrative to highlight someone who changed history
Today’s edition of Humanizing History™ is around 1900 words, an estimated 7-minute read.
The Why for This Week’s Topic
This month our theme is: Who’s Holding the Camera? Seeing the World Through Expanded Lenses.
Last week, in our newsletter, The Danger of a Single Story and How We Benefit from Many Lenses, we reviewed the importance of embracing diversity and nuance, or many stories and voices over limited approaches.
Expanding the lens for how we tell the stories of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders is of great need, especially in the United States.
Asian Americans represent a diverse and growing community. Using data from Pew Research Center, an article in Time states: “There are more than 22 million Asian Americans… representing nearly 50 ethnic groups and speaking more than 100 languages, and they make up the fastest growing racial or ethnic group among eligible U.S. voters. Yet little of their story is taught in K-12 U.S. schools.”
Erika Lee, prominent scholar of history, describes the lack of representation (and impact) of Asian Americans in our history texts and general K-12 curricula: “Until recently, U.S. historians largely ignored Asian immigrants and their U.S.-born descendants. When they did appear in scholarly monographs or textbooks, they were little more than footnotes and dismissed as tangential to the making of the United States… In a recent online survey of American adults in which participants were asked to name a well-known Asian American, the most common answer was ‘don’t know.’”
One of the repercussions of a single story, or in some cases the glaring absence of any story, is not being able to name someone — anyone.
What happens when others cannot utter a single name of someone who is considered to be Asian American, someone who represents an incredibly diverse, growing community of more than 20 million in the U.S.? (In a global perspective, people from Asia represent about 60 percent of the world’s population.)
How does that feed into stereotypes? How does it impact people’s willingness to ignore or participate in discrimination, from everyday interactions to laws and policies enacted by governments?
Today, we’re going to say the name of someone whose life's work was literally focused on expanding the lens for how we tell the stories of Asian American and Pacific Islander communities.
Though in his lifetime, he took hundreds of thousands of photographs — meticulously documenting protests and everyday life around Chinatown and larger New York — his name is not widely known.
Leveraging a rather literal approach of this month’s theme, for this edition of Humanizing History™, we’re highlighting the life’s work and enduring impact of photographer, and self-proclaimed activist, Corky Lee.
Becoming Corky Lee
Born in New York, Corky was given the name Lee Young Kok, but his NYC-issued birth certificate recorded his name as Lee Young Quoork.
At some point in middle school, he was eventually given the nickname Corky by his friends. And it stuck, as he simply stated, “So I became Corky.”
As the oldest of four brothers, and the son of Chinese immigrants who ran a family laundry business, Corky would grow up determined to make an indelible impact.
He was the first in his family to graduate from college. It was around that time, in the 1960s, his hands gripping a camera — a tool that was not as ubiquitous as it is today — Corky began documenting his world, focusing on Chinatown, NYC. As described in American Masters PBS, Corky chose a camera as his tool for social change, seeing it as a “sword against injustice,” a tangible way to “document, highlight, and advocate for Asian American communities.”
Perhaps the first impact he wanted to make was on his family. Corky describes how early in his career, he would leave copies of newspapers that featured his photography on the family’s kitchen table. His mother would show other people, pointing to the page, “This is my son.” He states, “That was basically a sense of pride, I was recognized outside of my own family, but within the Chinese community.”
Corky Lee’s Career Spans Decades, Captures Nuance
Over the course of more than six decades, from the 1960s until his unfortunate passing in 2021, Corky Lee photographed a variety of subjects.
With hundreds of thousands of photos, he captured nuanced moments and complex lives — of people cooking, dancing, playing music, working as train operators and firefighters, lighting candles for family members lost during the tragedy of 9/11, and wrapping one’s body in a U.S. American flag as a way to demonstrate patriotism during a time of rising Islamophobia, and other forms of religious and ethnic discrimination.
Corky captured events of the Civil Rights era that may have otherwise been buried, photographing what he described as “Chinese Americans exercising their democratic rights [and] voicing their concerns.”
For example, in 1975, Corky canonized the protest in Chinatown that drew 20,000 people, which Corky described as the “the largest protest of Chinese Americans in New York City” history — an organized response to “an incident of police brutality.”
In 1982, Corky Lee also visually recorded the strike of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, which included 15,000 garment workers.
“An Attempt to Educate People, One Photograph at a Time.”
In his own words, Corky has described how he aimed to expand the lens, or how he used photography as an educational tool for social change.
He describes his intention: “Being a street photographer, I see a different part of Chinatown that the general public does not see. It's not a drive-by tourist destination to me. It’s a real, living community of people trying to survive. There’s a human side of the story. We are not docile. We had some genuine concerns… there was a growing intensity to tell stories ourselves and not let the mainstream society dictate to us what we should see and believe.”
He describes the goal of his work: “When people look at the photographs, they can sort of read into it that this is what was done during a certain period of time. If they see deplorable conditions, they can say, this has to change. And maybe it’ll motivate people to do something to enact those changes, either individually or collectively.”
What inspired Corky to pursue a path of photography?
The “Golden Spike” Inspires Him To Expand the Lens
According to his brother, John Lee, Corky’s interest in photography was sparked in his teens, when he saw the iconic “Golden Spike” photograph of 1869, which was intended to commemorate the completion of the transcontinental railroad.
Taken in Promontory Summit, Utah, the photograph represents the physical location where thousands of miles of railroad track finally converged, as different groups of mostly immigrant workers (from Ireland, Germany, Italy) built the railroad from the east coast to Utah, and mostly immigrant workers (from China) built it from the west coast to Utah.
Dozens of men, nearly all or entirely White (the demographics have been debated) are featured in the frame, huddling around a train on the right, and another train on the left, with a champagne toast at the center.
Upon first glance, this photograph reads like a celebration, but it erases the contribution of thousands of Chinese workers, who had the unfathomable, dangerous task of building the railroads across challenging mountain terrain, which required great physical sacrifice and enhanced engineering skills.
This erasure is described by a Gilder Lehrman resource: “To meet its manpower needs, the Central Pacific hired 15,000 laborers, of whom more than 13,000 were Chinese immigrants. These immigrants were paid less than white workers, and, unlike whites, had to provide their own lodging. The crew had the formidable task of laying the track across California’s Sierra Nevada mountain range, blasting fifteen tunnels to cover 1,776 miles with 4,814 feet of new track. A close study of the photograph reveals that the Chinese workers who were present that day have been excluded.”
After decades of a hard-earned photography career, Corky had the opportunity to recreate this photograph, expanding the lens for this chapter of U.S. history.
In a tribute to Corky Lee, his brother John states: “In 2014, he finally corrected that injustice, by recreating the same scene, this time with the descendants of Chinese railroad workers and other Asian Americans whose forebears had been barred from the original photograph.”
When reflecting on his work, Corky states: “In all my photographs I’m trying to include pages that should be in American history books, but have been omitted.”
The Enduring Impact (and Costs) of Social Activism
Corky Lee’s work has had an indelible impact on society, and even how we may approach education.
His brother John discusses how Corky’s work impacted future generations: “For over five decades [Corky] covered protest demonstrations, cultural celebrations, job equality, voting rights, and everyday life — recording and rediscovering Asian American history when no one else would, and few news outlets cared. Corky’s photography became a catalyst for Ethnic Studies, ensuring that the history of Asian and Pacific Islander Americans would be accurately researched, depicted, and taught. His photography was compelling evidence that Americans of Asian and Pacific Islander descent were not ‘eternal foreigners,’ but integral to American society.”
Today, Corky Lee’s photography can easily be brought into the classroom, especially as there’s been growing legislation to expand how we teach U.S. History. According to Education Week, “The demand for K-12 curriculum on the lived experiences of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders has grown nationally in the last three years, with at least five states passing legislation requiring such instruction.”
The work of art and activism, however, can also come at a great cost.
Working for decades as, what Corky called a “struggling photographer in America,” caught up to him. On his feet for days on end, Corky suffered from chronic arthritis in his knees. He saw his collection of photographs as providing financial security for a one-day retirement that he could yet afford to take. As many artists face, Corky’s photographs were often plastered around the internet without credit, permission, or compensation.
And when Covid-19 struck, and Corky left his home once again to capture history in the making — in this case the rise of anti-Asian hate crimes spurred by political rhetoric around Covid — Corky caught the virus, and would unfortunately succumb to it.
According to his brother John, “[Corky] died as he lived, wielding his camera, fighting for his deeply held belief, that America was at its best when it practices diversity, equity, and inclusion of all its peoples and communities.”
Remembering Corky Lee
It was Corky’s hope to leave something for future generations, and his life and sacrifice is not forgotten. Artists and educators keep his story alive.
NYC-based artists, like Peach Tao working in collaboration with Chinatown Mural Project, created this mural, an incredible tribute to Corky Lee, as it’s located along the same streets of Chinatown that Corky walked throughout his life. (It’s also featured as our image for this week’s newsletter.)
A new book has been released, Corky Lee’s Asian America. It features over 200 of his most iconic photographs. Consider gifting it to a friend, or to your child’s classroom teacher.
Numerous documentaries and news segments about Corky Lee’s life and impact continue to emerge, such as the following clips, which we’ve referenced throughout our newsletter: American Masters PBS, PBS NewsHour, and CBS Sunday Morning.
It’s important to learn each other’s names, and to say each other's names out loud. Corky Lee is a name we can keep alive, so we can continue his legacy, and continue to expand how we tell the human story.
Say Hello
We’d love to hear from you! Do you have ideas or questions that you’d like to add to the conversation? Please contact us.
You can support our work by forwarding this newsletter to a friend or colleague.
We work with educators, schools, and other organizations. Reach out if you’d like to discuss our faculty workshops, student assemblies, and other ways to support educators in developing rich, humanizing curriculum.
Follow us on social media: Instagram, Facebook, or LinkedIn.
Theme: