“Photographic Justice: The Corky Lee Story” debuts on PBS May 13 for Asian/Pacific American Heritage Month

Photographic Justice: The Corky Lee Story (Photo by Jennifer Takaki, All is well photos)

Stephanie Prange

April 24, 2024

The documentary Photographic Justice: The Corky Lee Story debuts on PBS May 13 and on PBS Apps after a theatrical run for Asian/Pacific American Heritage Month.

For fifty years, Chinese-American photographer Corky Lee documented the celebrations, struggles, and daily lives of Asian-American Pacific Islanders. Determined to push mainstream media to include AAPI culture in the visual record of American history, Lee produced an astonishing archive of nearly a million photographs. His work takes on new urgency due to the alarming increase in anti-Asian attacks during the Covid pandemic. Jennifer Takaki’s intimate portrait reveals the triumphs and tragedies of the man behind the lens.

Corky Lee was born in New York in 1947, the son of Chinese immigrants who owned two laundries in Queens. He studied history at Queens College and became a community organizer in Manhattan’s Chinatown in the 1970s. Over the next five decades, he photographed countless protests and cultural events in the Asian American Pacific Islander community. Lee’s photographs documented the birth and growth of the Asian American social justice movement and he became known as “The Undisputed, Unofficial, Asian American Photographer Laureate.” His death in 2021 at the age of 73 from Covid was mourned in the press worldwide.

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Filmmaker Jennifer Takaki is a fourth-generation Japanese American from Colorado. She produced and directed in New York Photographic Justice: The Story of Corky Lee, which premiered at DOC NYC and was supported by the Ford Foundation and The Center for Asian American Media (CAAM). In 2023, she received the prestigious Better Angels Lavine Fellowship.