BY THE VILLAGE SUN | Another Corky Lee photo tribute show is being held, this time in a courthouse gallery in Downtown Brooklyn.
A legendary Chinatown activist photographer, Lee died of COVID at age 73 in January 2021. Lee was well known and beloved in Chinatown and the Asian and Pacific Islander community and among local news circles for his work during his life. He went by the humorously self-deprecating title of the “undisputed unofficial Asian American photographer laureate.” However, he received even wider recognition after his death, which was covered by national and international media.
Lee’s photo recreation of the 1869 “golden spike” celebration of the finishing of the First Transcontinental Railroad — this time, though, using descendants of the Chinese workers who actually laid much of the track — has become iconic.
A previous Corky Lee tribute show was held last summer at the Pearl River Mart gallery in Soho.
Titled “Photographic Justice: A Tribute to Corky Lee,” the new group photo exhibit is curated by Chee Wang Ng. In addition to photos by his photographer friends and colleagues, this show will also include works by Lee, thanks to permission from the photographer’s estate. It marks the first time since Lee’s passing that his photos will be publicly shown.
The show’s theme is “Healing.”
The exhibit will run from May 20 to Nov. 20 at the Honorable Charles P. Sifton Gallery, in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York, at 225 Cadman Plaza East, in Brooklyn. The courthouse gallery’s hours are Monday to Friday, 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Thank you Lincoln for your excellent coverage of local news. You were
a good friend and colleague to Corky Lee, and while he certainly is missed,
we sometimes forget it also took “a village” for Corky to have been able to
carry out his incredible pace of “photographic justice”. …and certainly you were instrumental in creating that “village”, watching his back..and being his friend
in a tough profession. Of course we knew him as a photographer…but he was so
proud to be accepted as both a photo-documentarian and..a journalist.