A Retrospective of Photographer Corky Lee's Work Documenting Asian American and Pacific Islander Communities
A new book examines the legacy of the late photojournalist, Corky Lee's mission to document Asian American and Pacific Islander communities. Artist Chee Wang Ng and historian Mae Ngai edited the book, Corky Lee's Asian America: Fifty Years of Photographic Justice and join us to discuss.
*This segment is guest-hosted by Kousha Navidar.
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Kousha Navidar: This is All Of It from WNYC. I'm Kousha Navidar in for Alison Stewart who's on medical leave. Corky Lee was a beloved photographer and activist who used a camera to document the lives and the movements of people in the Asian American and Pacific Islander community. A new collection captures Corky Lee's pursuits that spanned 50 years, half a century. The book is titled Corky Lee's Asian America: Fifty Years of Photographic Justice. The book features some of his best known images, but also pictures we've never seen before.
They all reflect the rich history of social movements like protests against police brutality in New York in the 1970s, a ping pong fundraiser at a health fair, and an image that Corky captured of a man from the sick faith draped in an American flag after 911. We're joined now by one of the book's co-editors Mae Ngai. She is the Lung Family Professor of Asian American Studies and Professor of History and co-director of the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race at Columbia University. Mae, welcome to All Of It.
Mae Ngai: Thank you. It's great to be here.
Kousha Navidar: Great to have you. Listeners, we would love to hear from you too. Do you identify as part of the AAPI community or has Corky Lee's work impacted you or have you ever met Corky Lee personally, or do you have a connection to our city's Chinatown where Corky Lee was a community organizer? How do you feel Chinatown has changed over the years? Give us a call, send us a text. The number is 212-433-9692, that's 212-433-WNYC.
Mae, reading the book, looking at the pictures, I feel like I got such a beautiful portrait of a person who was at the fabric of New York City and at many social movements. You have a particularly important perch in this because you've known Corky Lee since the 1970s as activists-
Mae Ngai: That's right.
Kousha Navidar: -in Chinatown. Can you help us understand who Corky was as a person and why his work was so important?
Mae Ngai: As you said, Corky and I were part of the emerging Asian American movement in the 1970s in New York's Chinatown. We were part of the young radicals that were making trouble, making good trouble all over Chinatown. Then over the years, Corky photographed virtually every event in the New York City area, not just in Chinatown, but in the metro area and also Japanese Americans, Filipino Americans, et cetera, et cetera. Then in 2019 when I was director of the ethnic studies program at Columbia, I invited him up to do an exhibit in our gallery.
He came and we talked about it, and he measured the walls and everything, and then it got delayed getting started, and then COVID hit and we never were able to complete that project. I feel very sad about that, but having known Corky for all those years and having seen him at virtually every event in New York, he was at every event. I wasn't at every event myself but he was a fixture there. I think he came to the commitment that he was going to document our community and our struggles, and he did that doggedly and with love for 50 years, 50 continuous years.
I don't know if you can say that about anybody else. It's really an extraordinary commitment that he had. I should say it wasn't a paid job. He did this out of love. Sometimes, especially during the spring when we had Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, he would photograph two or three events a day after he got off work.
Kousha Navidar: Wow. There are so many photographs in this collection. Corky Lee passed a little over three years ago in January of 2021. Tell me, what was the impetus for this collection and how did you organize the photographs in it?
Mae Ngai: That's a great question. The impetus came when an Asian American editor at Penguin Random House approached Corky's brother, his sole surviving relative and said, "I want to do a book." This is just parenthetically, I will say, this is why diversity in publishing is important because she knew who Corky was. We did a little work, we made a proposal and we had a book deal within half a year. Then we had set about to make the book. I want to say that Corky always wanted to have a book of his photos. He had started to do that in 2011.
He started to put together a collection and you know how things go, it was going to be a self-published book, and it just never got finished. How we approached our book, which is really his book, was we started with those 100 photos that he himself had selected in 2011 or his own book. Then we have another 10 years to cover. For that 10 years, we selected photos that Corky himself chose for exhibitions, for solo and group shows, and also photos that he lent to other creators, creative people who were making films or doing other projects.
These constituted a core of photos that really represented what Corky himself had chosen as representative of his work, one could say his best work. Then we added to that. We rounded out some of the themes with other photos, we found stuff in the archives, in metal slide boxes, stuff that's never been seen before. There's some gems in the book, but basically we tried to stay true to what Corky thought should have been in his book. Then we added some photos, but we also added essays, contributions from people who knew him, who could talk about him personally, but also could add broader social context.
Kousha Navidar: I'm so happy that you brought up the essays. I want to touch on that. If you're just listening in, this is All Of It, I'm Kousha Navidar. We're talking about the photographer, the activist, the fabric of New York's culture Corky Lee who was a photographer. We're talking with Mae Ngai, who is a co-editor of Corky Lee's Asian America: Fifty Years of Photographic Justice. Mae, you had mentioned that some of the things that you added to this collection were essays and the book includes an essay of John J. Lee, who is Corky Lee's younger brother, who's a retired public defender in southern California.
In his essay, which is titled Young Quoork to Be Praiseworthy of the Nation, he writes that Corey was a product of his times, but he was also more directly a product of his family. Corky, like you mentioned, was at the very fabric of New York Society. What did his brother mean by that and why is that context important for understanding Corky's work?
Mae Ngai: I think John Corky's brother and Corky himself were very devoted to their family, to their parents and their siblings. Corky's father was an immigrant. He was a hand laundry man in Jamaica, Queens. He had actually served in the US Army during World War II, so he is a veteran. He was a paper son, meaning somebody who came under a fake identity as a way to get around the Chinese exclusion laws and then later they were able to recover their true identity in the 1950s.
Corky grew up living in an apartment above a hand laundry. He and his brothers all worked in that laundry. Corky knew how to run it by the time he was in junior high school. He went to Queens College when there were very few Asian students there. He started a Chinese American students club and he majored in history. What I think is important, and I think what John is trying to get at in his essay was that Corky and his brothers, they were part of a generation that was born at the tail end of the Chinese exclusion era, which ran from 1882 to 1943.
They were born at the tail end of that during the Cold War. Then they witnessed the vast changes in Chinese and Asian America that took place after 1965 with the reform of the immigration laws. I consider that a really unique perspective sitting at what we could call a hinge in history, a turning point. Corky was both an observer, but also a participant in that change. I think in that way, he represents a whole generation of Asian Americans who grew up in that period. I'm from that same generation. I'm also what Corky calls an ABC from NYC, an American-born Chinese from New York City.
Kousha Navidar: Sorry, I stepped on you a little bit. An American-born Chinese in New York City is the ABC there, which is lovely. You had mentioned that Corky was both a participant and an observer of these social movements. How do you think he balanced those two?
Mae Ngai: Corky was known to be a great storyteller and a gallarus fellow, but I think he was also a very private person. Taking a position behind the camera, I believe enabled him to be part of the action without being necessarily a direct participant in the action. He was always there, he was part of it, but he also had half a step back. I think that suited his personality. It also enabled him to stay above the fray because the Asian American movement, I don't think anybody will be too surprised about this, but there are a lot of different points of view, and there were conflicts and differences. Corky was ecumenical. He photographed everybody and everything. I think being the photojournalist and the photo documentarian enabled him to take that ecumenical view of the movement and capture all of it.
Kousha Navidar: A lot of it happened in Chinatown. In the intro of the book, it states that Corky knew and loved Chinatown deeply calling it a part of my soul. What were some early forms of the activism that you're mentioning that Corky started to take part in in Chinatown?
Mae Ngai: Corky first went to Chinatown in 1969 after he graduated from college, and he became draft-eligible at that point. He declared himself a conscientious objector because he opposed the war in Vietnam, and he was granted that status by the draft board. They assigned him to work as part of the VISTA program, which was your community service program. He was assigned to work at Two Bridges Neighborhood Council, which was a social service agency. He worked as a tenant organizer. He would go into the tenements and talk to the people and document all the dilapidated conditions and take pictures of them. He borrowed a camera from a friend to take pictures.
That was both how was active [inaudible 00:12:05] how he first started using a camera. Then he joined a group called the Asian Media Collective, which became the Basement Workshop, which is what we all know is a big cultural and arts center in the early Asian American movement. Corky at first was interested in taking slides. He took slides because he made slideshows, and he used these to show to school students, to community groups. He, from a very early time, saw photography as a way to educate and organize people.
Kousha Navidar: 50 years is a long time to document a community. How did his activism start and then how did it evolve over time? Did it broaden to more groups? Did it narrow in on specific causes? Talk to us about that a little bit.
Mae Ngai: I would say both focused and narrowed and broadened. He did both. Some of the first events that Corky organized and photographed was the New York Chinatown Health Fair, the famous street fair in the summer of 1970. He had previously organized a streetcar race down Mott Street with a bunch of other young activists and social service organizers. He knew how to close Mott Street. He knew who do you go to in the city to get Mott Street closed. I would say there's probably three people on the planet who know how to do that. Corky knew how to do that.
He helped build the booths for the street fair, he got Mott Street closed, he got everybody else involved, and then he also photographed it. He was really an outgoing person who knew how to work with other people, how to bring them in, how to organize them. He also liked to photograph Chinatown's everyday life. It's street life, scenes of kids, the old timers, the old sojourners. He captured Chinatown at a time in the 1970s when it was beginning to transform, when the old so-called bachelor society was being added to with new immigrants, with families. He captured that whole transformation. Over time, he captured how Chinatown evolved into a really diverse community.
He was always interested in other Asian American groups. He photographed the Japanese-American Days of Remembrance that took place every year memorializing the internment in the concentration camps during World War II. He made a point of going to all the Asian ethnic holiday parades, Philippine Independence Day parade, India Day Parade, Sikh Parade, Koreans. He photographed all of those so you get a really interesting portrait of the ethnic diversity that grows in the 1990s and the 2000s.
Kousha Navidar: That is something that I found quite interesting in the book. Was that, as it evolves, you can see Asian American expanding into Asian American Pacific Islander. In the '80s and '90s, Corky Lee started covering more of these events. What caused the makeup of the AAPI population to change in the United States at that point?
Mae Ngai: After the immigration laws were reformed in 1965, starting in 1970 really, many more Asian groups immigrated to the United States. There had been smaller communities of Filipinos and Indians before this time but what you see in the '80s and going forward is a real demographic explosion of ethnic diversity among Asian Americans. Corky was very aware of that, and he captured all of that with his camera.
Kousha Navidar: If you could point, and 50 years is such a long time, but after the '80s and '90s, is there a specific handful of moments that you could point to where Corky's presence and photography really made a difference in capturing the zeitgeist of the time?
Mae Ngai: 9/11 was a big turning point, I think, because Asian Americans and especially those Asian Americans who looked like they were Arab or Muslim came under racist attack, and Corky fell very deeply about that. He took photographs of Chinatown, which was devastated by the 9/11 attacks. It was economically devastated. He also took pictures of other communities. One of his most famous pictures is of a candlelight vigil that was organized by Sikh Americans in Central Park the Saturday after 9/11.
One of his iconic photos in that picture is a Sikh man with an American flag draped around his shoulders, which was to signal that they were Americans, they were not terrorists. If I may say, Corky loved to photograph Asian Americans with American flags. He took hundreds of these photos, and he often liked to take photos that juxtaposed Asian Americans in ethnic costume, especially at their parades and festivals, but also carrying American flags, whether they were flags or stickers or umbrellas. He liked to show that Asian Americans had an Asian identity and an American identity. Corky himself believed that he was a patriot.
Kousha Navidar: Reframing what patriot looks like, it sounds like you're saying through his photographs as well.
Mae Ngai: Exactly.
Kousha Navidar: Let's go to the end of his life. There's this December 2020 photograph of Joanne Kwong with lanterns made by volunteers to string across Mott Street, which you had mentioned before to light up Chinatown. What kind of moments did Corky Lee capture among Chinatown's residents towards the end of his life?
Mae Ngai: The first year of the pandemic, 2020, Chinatown was really shut down and then you had a rise of anti-Asian hate. Corky documented all of that. He always wore a mask when he went to Chinatown. Of course, he couldn't travel to other places but he could take the subway to Chinatown. His photographs are really touching from this period. At one level, he shows the economic devastation of Chinatown. There's a photo of Doyers Street completely shut down. Every shop, every restaurant has their gate down.
He also wanted to show that Chinese people were victims and not the cause of the virus so his photographs of a woman selling hand sanitizer on Canal Street in the middle of the winter, or a man selling Jiangsu grab-and-go foods from a little luncheonette in Chinatown. He had people pose in front of their favorite restaurants that were shuttered. There's a whole series of photographs of people posing in front of restaurants.
Then, of course, he photographed demonstrations against anti-Asian violence. He photographed a community street patrol who going around talking to grocers and handing them leaflets about how to practice social distancing and masking in their shops. He really tried to show how the community was struggling with and grappling with this ordeal.
Kousha Navidar: Is there a picture? I'm sure there are many, but can you touch on one picture may be of all of Corky's photographs that continues to leave a lasting impression on you.
Mae Ngai: Well, it's an unfair question, Koush.
Kousha Navidar: [laughs] I'm sorry.
Mae Ngai: I have to say, I'm partial myself to the photographs he took of Chinatown in the 1970s. Photographs of ordinary people crossing the street, getting their groceries, living their lives. Corky would say, "I want to show Chinatown as a real place with real people, not a tourist drive-by." Real people with real concerns. That's what really stays with me, and I think what he also carried throughout his whole 50-year-long career.
Kousha Navidar: Does that ethos influence you in your own career at all in the work that you do today, that memory of Corky?
Mae Ngai: I'm a historian. I'm a historian of immigration to the United States and of Asian American history. I think what this book does, it's a visual narrative of the Asian American movement from 1970 to 2020, and that is from its earliest days. It's not the beginning. It's not the only Asian American movement, but our contemporary one. Chinese and other Asians were fighting for social justice since they stepped foot on American soil.
In terms of our contemporary movement, and we can trace back a couple of generations to the 1970s, I think this book is really a remarkable narrative. We put Corky's photos together in chronological order. A lot of people know Corky's photographs from the internet because they're ubiquitous, and you can see all kinds of photos from different times and places. When you put them together in chronological order, with some sense of the themes, you have a historical arc. That's something that I hope this book can contribute is not only for people who enjoy and think about these pictures but also think about the broad history that it represents.
Kousha Navidar: Corky was a big part of that history over 50 years and even more just being a part of American society. You've described some beautiful pictures. I appreciate you being gamed for that one question about which picture stands out to you. Listeners, if you'd like to see that picture and more you can check out Corky Lee's Asian America: Fifty Years of Photographic Justice. We've been talking to one of the co-editors of the book, Mae Ngai, who's a professor of Asian American Studies and professor of history and co-director of the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race at Columbia University. Mae, thank you so much for this work.
Mae Ngai: Thank you.
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