‘Photographic justice’ explores asian portraits
If every picture is worth a thousand words, what do we make of a million pictures? “Photographic Justice: The Corky Lee Story” (10 p.m., PBS, TV-14, check local listings) profiles Chinese American photographer Corky Lee, who spent a career documenting the rituals, celebrations and daily lives of oftenunseen Asian Americans, amassing an archive estimated at a million images.
His goal was to use his camera to combat what he perceived as injustices against Asian Americans and to counter the stereotyping of mainstream media and the denigrating depictions coming out of Hollywood.
Lee was inspired by his father’s stories of working as a laundry man in the U.S. military during World War II, a military conflict fraught with extreme attitudes about race. While the struggle against Hitler was seen as a way to save the world from the Nazis’ “master race” philosophies, the war with Japan produced home-front propaganda shot through with 19thcentury notions of a “Yellow Peril,” and feelings that the enemy was somehow less than human. For their part, the military brass of Japan had master-race attitudes of their own, exhibited by their treatment of conquered Koreans, Chinese and others.
Born in 1947, Lee died in 2021 of complications related to COVID-19. Before his illness, he had been active in patrolling New York’s Chinatown, where residents had been subject to violent attacks arising from fears whipped up about COVID being a “Chinese” disease.
› Netflix serves up the Spanish documentary series “Cooking Up Murder,” exploring the many stories and multiple identities of celebrity chef Cesar Roman. He had built a reputation for regional Spanish dishes and was anointed the “king of cachopo,” a kind of comfort food popular in Northern Spain. His reputation unraveled and his multiple identities emerged after he was arrested for the murder of one of his employees. “Cooking” heats up over three episodes.
› Also streaming on Netflix, the melodrama miniseries “Thank You, Next” follows an overheated divorce case among the rich and stylish. While hardly an unusual story for a show produced by David E. Kelly or Shonda Rhimes, this series comes from Turkey, a society divided between a desire to identify with a secular West and those who seek a more Islamic future.
› Britbox introduces the original contemporary detective series “After the Flood,” from the makers of “Happy Valley.”
The action unfolds in a quaint British town inundated by rising waters. Sophie Rundle plays pregnant officer PC Joanna Marshall, investigating a series of unusual deaths. Most of her colleagues believe that the victims died as a result of the natural disaster. But the more she digs, the more it looks like the water was used to cover up a series of well-planned murders.