Phil Tajitsu Nash Writes "A Tribute to Corky Lee and the Fight for 'Photographic Justice'"

Adjunct Professor Phil Tajitsu Nash writes “A Tribute to Corky Lee and the Fight for ‘Photographic Justice’” in the Smithsonian Folklife magazine. Corky Lee was a Chinese American photojournalist who documented and brought to light the plight of Asian American communities over the last five decades. He died at the age of 73 on January 21, 2021 after battling COVID-19.

I got to know Corky in the 1970s, when we both were active in the Basement Workshop, an early AAPI arts organization in NYC Chinatown that was the hub for many other political, social service, arts, and advocacy groups. A few years earlier, as a tenant organizer in the Two Bridges neighborhood of Manhattan’s Lower East Side, Corky had picked up a camera to document housing code violations committed by neglectful landlords. He understood the power that earlier social reform photographers such as Jacob Riis had on the urban landscape and was drawn to the calling.

Later, when he found that his front-page New York Post photo of a Chinatown man with a badly bleeding face galvanized the city against unjustified police violence, he fully committed himself to a combination of photojournalism and activism that he called “photographic justice.”

Read the full article.