Corky Lee

Peter Yew, a Chinese-American man, surrounded by policemen with blood rushing down his face 
Thousands of Chinatown residents take to the streets to protest the police brutality in their community
A Sikh man draped in the United States flag in the heat of anti-Muslim attacks following the 9/11
A group of descendants of Chinese railroad workers re-creating the famous Promontory Summit photo. 

Corky Lee was an influential Asian American photographer, an activist, and a self-claimed "unofficial Asian American photographer laureate”.  He dedicated his life to documenting the experience of Asian Americans and played a vital role in shaping the visual narrative of Asian Americans.


Lee was born in 1947 in Queens, New York.  His father was a World War II veteran who owned a laundrette and his mother was a seamstress. Growing up in New York City, Corky Lee witnessed firsthand the struggles and discrimination faced by Asian Americans in the 1960s and 1970s. He worked as a community organizer in New York’s Chinatown, connecting elders to social services and educating the flood of new immigrants (post Hart-Celler Act) of their rights. He taught himself photography and started documenting lives in Chinatown when it was brewing with social activism. 


In 1975, he took a picture of Peter Yew, a Chinese-American man, surrounded by policemen with blood rushing down his face from police brutality. The photo appeared on the front page of the New York Post, sparking thousands of Chinatown residents to take to the streets to protest the police brutality in their community. 


Lee also photographed protests following the 1982 murder of Vincent Chin, a Chinese man who was  brutally bludgeoned to death by disgruntled Detroit auto workers who mistook him for Japanese.


Other famous photos by Corky Lee include a Sikh man draped in the United States flag in the heat of anti-Muslim attacks following the 9/11. (Although Sihks are not Muslims, their headdress made them easily identifiable targets)

In 2014, Lee and a group of Asian Americans re-created the famous Promontory Summit photo with descendants of Chinese railroad workers.  In the 1869 original, celebrating the meeting of transcontinental railways, there was a conspicuous absence of Chinese workers, who made up around 90% of Western workforce.  


Tragically, on January 27, 2021, Corky Lee passed away due to complications from COVID-19.