Corky Lee was affectionately known as Asian America’s “unofficial photographer laureate.” Put together by his family and friends after his untimely death from COVID-19, Corky Lee’s Asian America: Fifty Years of Photographic Justice (2024) is, in essence, a retrospective, presenting his works in roughly chronological order, interspersed with essays from loved ones, colleagues, and even the subjects of his images. 

Lee began photographing in the 1970s while working as a young community activist in New York City’s Chinatown. Unsurprisingly, the book is, in one dimension, an ode to the neighborhood, not as a tourist destination but as a lived-in community and hotbed of social justice movements. From the start, Lee’s motives were social. He took photos of everything and everyone, from everyday people dancing, lifting weights, or simply standing outside their favorite restaurants, to Asian American icons like Yuri Kochiyama and Yo-Yo Ma.

But what he loved photographing more than anything was social justice in action. He captured, among other moments, incidents of police brutality, the pain of the South Asian community post-9/11, and the rampant spread of hate crimes against Asians during COVID-19. The result in Corky Lee’s Asian America is a stunning glimpse into the fight for racial justice over the last half-century — one many Americans haven’t seen. Mainstream news sources did not capture Chinatown landlord-tenant disputes or protests for a neighborhood health center, as Lee did. It did not focus on Asian American opposition to the Vietnam War, as Lee did in a particularly arresting photo of activist Grace Lee Boggs holding a megaphone at a rally in front of the Washington Monument.

His work was not merely photojournalism but also art in its own right. His favorite of his own works was a revision of Andrew Russell’s historic 1869 photograph of the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad, which leaves out the Chinese laborers who built most of the western railways. In his 2014 revision, Lee gathered 250 Asian Americans of all ages, including descendants of the original railroad workers, at Promontory Point in Utah; they stand together before two trains facing each other, their expressions ranging from morose to neutral to joyous as the sparse Great Basin landscape stretches on behind them.

Readers might understandably criticize the book for focusing on the Chinese American story within the greater Asian American narrative, especially while boasting such a sweeping title. But though Lee started off photographing what he knew — he once told his loved ones that Chinatown was “part of [his] soul” — he worked to broaden his focus. He knew, as his fellow social activists did, that the fates of different Asian American groups are tied together. He photographed Japanese Americans celebrating their Obon Buddhist festival, the Filipino American community’s Flores de Mayo festival, Sikh Americans holding a candlelight vigil in New York after 9/11, and many other instances of a diverse Asian America.

Some might also wonder if the book is a little overly didactic. The editors provide extensive sociohistorical context, which at times comes across as dry, such as discussion about the United States census in the introduction to Lee’s photographs from the 1980s and 1990s. Yet that educational bent resonates with Lee’s goals: He was, as his friend, professor Mae Ngai, writes, an “activist-photographer.” People of Asian descent have lived in this country for almost as long as it’s existed, and yet the primary Asian American condition is still invisibility — Corky Lee’s Asian America renders them visible.

Corky Lee’s Asian America: Fifty Years of Photographic Justice (2024), edited by Chee Wang Ng and Mae Ngai and published by Crown Publishing Group, is available for purchase online and in bookstores.