Months of work had led up to this: After studying the late Chinese American photographer Corky Lee, fourth-graders at the California Creative Learning Academy in Eagle Rock watched Friday as their teachers hung their photos in an art installation.
Griffin Gaerlan, 9, had taken a striking photo of himself holding up a camera, imitating Lee in a famous self-portrait.
Lee’s historic work
It was Lee’s photos documenting police brutality, however, that left the deepest impression on Gaerlan. Lee took photos in New York’s Chinatown when a Chinese American man was beaten by NYPD officers (who had been trying to intervene in a police beating of a teen). Lee’s photos of Peter Yew, with blood streaming down his face as he was led away by police, led to thousands of people in Chinatown protesting against police violence.
Corky Lee captured pivotal images of Asian American history, like this 1975 protest against police brutality in New York’s Chinatown.
“Without these pictures, we wouldn’t have any proof, no knowledge of any of this happening,” Gaerlan said. “And it really made an impact on the world.”
His classmate Mayla Stegall, also 9, nodded.
“He was actually there in the moment so he actually knows the truth,” Stegall said. “And he’s just trying to show other people so that they understand too.”
Around the country this month, school kids are marking Asian Pacific American Heritage Month. Anna May Wong and Jeremy Lin are some of the most celebrated figures, showing up on fact sheets and in word searches. But figures who are less widely-known outside the Asian American community, like Lee, are also getting their due.
Photography as a ‘sword’
Gary San Angel, an artist and filmmaker, is making sure of that. A long-time mentee of Lee’s, San Angel taught the photography course to the fourth-graders in Eagle Rock. He explained how Lee — who died of COVID-19 in 2021 at 73 — used his photography as a “sword,” as Lee liked to say, to fight injustice and indifference.
San Angel said Lee also worked to rectify the historical record. Lee had long questioned why an 1869 photo taken after the transcontinental railroad was completed was missing any of the Chinese men who built it. In 2014, he restaged the photo, this time with the descendants of the rail workers.
Lee’s business card had the joking title of the “Undisputed, Unofficial Asian American Photographer Laureate,” but it was not far from the truth. He was present at a number of key moments in Asian American history, like when protests broke out in Detroit in 1982 after Vincent Chin’s killers were allowed to walk.
One of Lee’s most famous photographs was taken after 9/11 at a candlelight vigil, featuring a Sikh man wrapped in an American flag.
After 9/11, when Sikh Americans were being scapegoated and attacked, Corky Lee took this image of a Sikh man at a candelight vigil.
( Corky Lee with permission of the Corky Lee Estate )
“What Corky was trying to do is just humanize all our stories,” San Angel said. “Then we can also recognize we are a part of the fabric here in the US.”
Have a question about Southern California’s Asian American communities?
Josie Huang reports on the intersection of being Asian and American and the impact of those growing communities in Southern California.
