Young Corky Lee (September 5, 1947 – January 27, 2021) was a Chinese-American activist, community organizer, photographer, journalist, and the self-proclaimed unofficial Asian American Photographer Laureate. He called himself an "ABC from NYC ... wielding a camera to slay injustices against APAs." His work chronicled and explored the diversity and nuances of Asian American culture often ignored and overlooked by mainstream media, striving to make Asian American history a part of American history.

Lee was born on September 5, 1947, in Queens, New York City. He was the second child of Lee Yin Chuck and Jung See Lee, both of whom had immigrated to the United States from Guangdong, Taishan, China. His father, who had served in the US Army in World War II, owned a laundrette. His mother was a seamstress. Lee had an older sister (Fee) and three younger brothers (John, James, and Richard). Lee took on the nickname, "Corky", to avoid the constant mispronunciation of his given name, pointing to an awareness of his American-born Chinese identity that would inform his later work.

Lee attended Jamaica High School before going on to study American history at Queens College in 1965. Lee taught himself photography, borrowing cameras because he could not afford his own. He said his work was inspired by an 1869 photograph he had seen in a social studies textbook that celebrated the completion of the transcontinental railroad at Promontory Summit, Utah. While the massive construction project had employed thousands of Chinese workers, the photo depicted only white laborers. This lack of representation inspired Lee's lifelong goal of increasing the visibility of the Asian American community. The Stanford University Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project would later object to Lee's claims, by pointing out two Chinese workers who are in the famous Andrew J. Russell "handshake" photograph. Lee had begun to update his research and share the news of the railroad workers identified in the A.J. Russell photos among people he met in the time before his death.

After graduating from Queens College, Lee began working as a community organizer at the Two Bridges Neighborhood Council in Manhattan's Chinatown neighborhood. Here, he educated immigrants on their rights in their new country and connected elderly members of the community with social services. This time was also a crucial developmental period for his photographic activism. Lee took particular notice of the poor and unsafe housing conditions common for many in his community and began documenting the daily lives of those around him through photography. This became part of a larger fight for tenant rights, which were increasingly jeapordized as large corporations continued to purchase and seal-off buildings in the area.

Lee's work documented many key events in Asian American political history. Lee's first major published photograph was his 1975 photograph of a Chinese American man named Peter Yew being beaten by NYPD officers, featured in the New York Post. In April of 1975, Yew had witnessed a 15-year-old girl begin beaten by police officers at a traffic stop. When he intervened, he was beaten on the spot and arrested with charges of assault and resisting arrest. Lee's photo captured Yew, covered in blood, as he was being led away by the police officers from a crowd of angry observers. On the day Lee's picture was published, 20,000 people marched from Chinatown to City Hall protesting police brutality in response to the beating of Peter Yew. Lee himself was part of this march, documenting the protestor's march through Chinatown and New York City.

Lee photographed protests after the 1982 murder of Vincent Chin in Michigan. Chin was a young Chinese American man living in Detroit who was killed by two recently laid-off auto workers, Ronald Ebens, a former superintendent at Chrysler Motors, and his stepson. The perpetrators attacked Chin, of Chinese descent, after mistaking him for being Japanese, as Japanese companies were blamed for the loss of American auto industry jobs. The two men were freed after facing no jail time, at which point protests erupted due to anger and discontent over the result of trial. Similar to the case of Peter Yew, Lee's photographs documented yet another event representative of the resistance against Asian American discrimination.

One of Lee's most famous photos was taken after 9/11 and captured a Sikh man in Jersey City with an American flag draped over his shoulders in protest against the rising anti-Hindu violence.

In 2014, Lee's career came full circle when he returned to scene of the famous Transcontinental railroad photo with 400 Chinese Americans from around the country to reshoot the photo and rectify the absence he had observed when he was young.