Teri, Corky Lee and his photographic record of Asian America

I had a long phone conversation today with Teri’s close friend Becky from NJ who had been a fellow activist in NYC over 50 years ago. She unfortunately lost her husband to cancer two years ago.

Always up to date on all things Asian American, Becky told me that a new PBS documentary was showing now during Asian American Heritage Month entitled Photographic Justice: The Corky Lee Story. It is a moving account of Corky’s 50-year ‘hobby’ documenting Asian American history and injustices (housing, anti-Asian racism) in NYC. He was omnipresent – a word that rings completely apt – at all important Asian American events whether they be cultural, social or political in nature, whether Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Korean … documenting, documenting, documenting.

Corky’s most iconic image is a 2014 re-creation of the meeting of East and West railroads at Promontory Point, Utah in 1869. Somehow, not a single Chinese laborer (some 12,000) appeared in the historic celebratory photograph of the transcontinental linking. Nearly 150 years later, to restore the proper historical perspective, he gathered Chinese-American descendants of those railroad builders and photographed them at the same point – an image indelibly stored at the Smithsonian. But that was only one of his 800,000 images, mostly of Asian Americans.

A self-taught photographer, Corky was called the ‘Asian American photographer laureate’ and his work was recently recognized with a series of shows of his community-based, justice-focused photographic record. Still active to the last, he probably contracted COVID during another documentary effort of a protest of anti-Asian hate crimes while masked, and succumbed in January 2021. Corky’s obituary appeared in the New Yorker Magazine. This documentary chronicles his Chinatown roots, his tireless and humble approach to photography, and his courageous and principled soul.

Teri was a good friend of Corky’s as they both went to Queens College and Corky founded the Asian American students’ club there. After Corky graduated, he asked Lois, Teri’s close college classmate, to take over the lead. The three often attended the same demonstrations in Chinatown. After Teri and I met in 1971, we spent time together in NYC at Asian American gatherings and she introduced me to Corky, when he was already beginning his photographic journey.

In the documentary, in the still image at 9:32, Becky appears in the middle with her glasses. I was stunned to see Teri in the still image at 9:42 in the left lower corner, at a demonstration in 1971.

Teri's small part in Corky’s indelible historical record!

I just learned that that picture appeared in the May 19th NY Times Sunday Book Review .