The first time An Rong Xu thought he had met Corky Lee was in 2008. Xu was a first year photography student at the School of Visual Arts who was in search of a compelling project about Asian Americans. He went to the Asian American Arts Centre in Chinatown, where the director Bob Lee told him simply, "You gotta find Corky Lee."
Lee, who died at 73 last week from coronavirus, had by then become the documentarian photographer of Asian Americans in New York City, shooting the community in its various moments of repose, work, and unrest: a taxi driver at the wheel balancing a cup of coffee; a child staring absentmindedly against the fluorescent backdrop of a worn factory; young male protesters linked arm-in-arm in unity. Then there were the countless community events, poetry readings, and small museum galas that Lee shot because nobody else cared enough to.
Xu saw this dedication close-up when he got to shadow Lee as he photographed on weekends. "He was the truest form of a documentarian," he recently reflected. "He was there to take a picture and make sure no one forgets."
"Corky’s work was proof that we cannot be erased," he added.
From the start, Lee had told Xu that he looked familiar to him. Then, one day, he produced a photo of a rally on Baxter Street urging the city to let an old police station be used as a senior center. "Is this you?" he asked, pointing at a seven-year-old, one of several elementary school children at the protest.
The young photographer was floored. "Holy shit, that's me," he said, realizing he had actually encountered Corky over a decade ago.
Lee had a knack for triggering such feelings of astonished appreciation, for his encyclopedic knowledge of Chinese American history, his more than four-decade long career eked out as a freelancer, and his seemingly innate ability to recognize what many others did not. Born in Queens to working-class Chinese immigrants, he was a self-taught photographer who worked by day at a printing press in Williamsburg. In his off-hours, he became the most prolific chronicler of Asian American history in New York City, propelled by a sense of racial and moral outrage.
He saw his photography as having "an active role in the making of history and giving voice to people who were invisible," said Herb Tam, a curator at the Museum of the Chinese in America.
Lee saw an internal struggle too, as Asian Americans were trying to understand their immigrant and hyphenated identities and how it could translate into political power. "He saw all this as related to historical lineage, part of a continuum starting in the '60s," Tam said.
Ryan Lee Wong, an art critic and curator, said that what set Lee apart from other photographers was that he was embedded in activist circles.
"He always knew where to go," Wong said. And he didn't shy away from showing intense confrontations — Lee's 1975 image of a bloodied Asian man named Peter Yew being escorted by police ran on the front page of The New York Post.
His protest photos, Wong said, "cut directly against the stereotype that Asian American are apolitical, that Asian Americans don’t march."
Corky Lee
In what is often referred to as his most monumental project, Lee in 2014 organized a group of Asian Americans, including direct descendants of the Chinese railroad workers, to recreate a 1869 photo that showed the completion of the railroad at Promontory Summit, Utah. Lee was in junior high school when he first closely inspected the original photo only to find that it featured no Chinese people, the very group whose blood and sweat had built the country's railroad. Correcting injustices against Asian Americans became his lifelong obsession.
In a more personal example, Samantha Cheng, a broadcast journalist who was one of his closest friends, said that Lee made a point of keeping his savings in an account at Abacus, a Chinese-family-owned bank based in Chinatown that was prosecuted and later vindicated of mortgage fraud and other crimes. For many, both in and outside the community, the Manhattan district attorney had unfairly singled out the bank as a scapegoat for the housing crisis. Many suspected racial and cultural bias as the underlying motivation.
"He put his money where his mouth was," Cheng said.
Xu, who now photographs for the New York Times, Rolling Stone, Time, and The Atlantic, said that Lee had been working right up until he became sick. He often took the subway from his home in Queens to Chinatown. The pandemic had instilled the photographer with an even greater fervor to document and organize.
Ultimately, he was a creature of the city. While Lee may have spent his life promoting the culture and history of Asian Americans, "When he opened his mouth, he was a New Yorker," Cheng said. "He loved his city, he loved the community he grew up in."
In October, he organized an outdoor photography exhibit on Mott and Mosco streets. It would be his last.
"He didn't want Chinatown to die," Xu said. "He wouldn’t let anything stop him."
