Corky Lee poses with his 1982 photograph of striking garment workers, featured in the New York Historical Society\u2019s exhibition Chinese American: Exclusion\/Inclusion. \u201cIt was the largest Chinese garment worker rally in the history of NYC. 15,000 showed up to lobby for a new contract \u2013 it was pretty monumental. Fifteen, twenty years after that, the garment industry is no longer a viable employment source for the Chinese immigrant community, but back in the day, at least one person in the family had to work for the union, because that was the source of health insurance. Because there was absolutely no health insurance in the laundries and restaurants.\u201d Corky was still in high school when he began noticing the absence of Chinese Americans in the media and newspapers around him \u2013 even the historic photograph of the completion of the transcontinental railroad, built by Chinese labor, didn\u2019t have any Chinese workers in it. He has been committed to making his community visible ever since, photographing not only Chinatown but Asian America for more than four decades. The 68 y.o. Queens native has been the country\u2019s self-appointed, undisputed, Unofficial Asian American Photographer Laureate for so long that even the post office agrees: a letter addressed to just this title in \u201cElmhurst, Queens\u201d actually found its way to the photographer.<\/figcaption><\/figure>
\nphoto via
\nCreator: Katja Heinemann | Credit: Katja Heinemann
\nCopyright: \u00a9 Katja Heinemann<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"(The Village Sun Obit) Lee, who was a gentle soul, went by the whimsical moniker the \u201cundisputed unofficial Asian American photographer laureate.\u201d For 50 years, starting in the 1970s, he documented Manhattan\u2019s Chinatown and the city\u2019s Asian-American and Pacific Islander communities. (Photo by Corky Lee) Throwing a hook: Japanese American teacher was secret women’s boxing … <\/p>\n
Continue reading “Legendary Chinatown Photographer Corky Lee dies from Covid”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,107,16,80],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-37940","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","category-occupy-wall-st","category-photography","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mutanteggplant.com\/vitro-nasu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37940","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mutanteggplant.com\/vitro-nasu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mutanteggplant.com\/vitro-nasu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mutanteggplant.com\/vitro-nasu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mutanteggplant.com\/vitro-nasu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37940"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.mutanteggplant.com\/vitro-nasu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37940\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mutanteggplant.com\/vitro-nasu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37940"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mutanteggplant.com\/vitro-nasu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37940"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mutanteggplant.com\/vitro-nasu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37940"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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