CANDELAR FEATURE: MAY
MAY 2026: Christian Lee
May Candelar page featuring Lee’s image, Shadowed Breeze, Crenshaw, 2025
Born and raised in Los Angeles, California, Christian Lee is a 2026 Documentary Fellow at The Gotham, supported by NBC Universal, and a 2026 A-DOC Allies Fellow, working on his feature film debut, a docufiction drama on the first African American church in South Central, Los Angeles. Working between photography and filmmaking, Lee studied under Cauleen Smith, Andrea Fraser, Bridget R. Cooks, Cosmo Whyte, and Renee Tajima-Peña.
Lee is a 43rd Annual Telly Award® winning visual storyteller and Hoyt Scholar at UCLA. His work has been published in The New York Times, TIME Magazine, Vogue, the Los Angeles Times, the World Photography Organization, Lenscratch, LensCulture, and Booooooom. Lee is an Emma Bowen Foundation Fellow, W.M. Keck Fellow, Sony World Photo Honoree, The KALH Future Grant Recipient, YoungArts Winner, and a Scholastic National Medalist with recognition from over 60 competitions and publications. Awarded the 2025 Lenscratch Student Prize, he is a Class of XXXVII alumnus of Canon’s Eddie Adams Workshop, an Up Next Photographer at Diversify Photo, and a Member of NAACP, Film Independent, and AAJA, whose moving and still images explore themes of youth culture, assimilation, and intergenerational trauma, all within communities of color. Lee works in Creative Affairs at Warner Bros. Television, where he won Best Drama at the 2025 WBD Pitch Competition for his prestige limited series Black Korea.
ABOUT ‘BETWEEN SUNS’
My family settled in South Los Angeles upon immigrating to the United States. Many Koreans sought refuge in historically African American neighborhoods, where tension arose between these new residents and Black Angelenos who built homes following the Great Migration.
I remember late afternoon drives down MLK Blvd. and spontaneous visits to Crenshaw, where we stood before the tiny apartment my estranged father and his siblings grew up in. The relationship my relatives shared with the community unfolded as a complex interplay between sorrow and joy, struggle and success—the frequently synthesized immigrant narrative assumed dynamic shape while attending the Kingdom Day Parade. Honoring Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy was instrumental to the progress of our respective communities and necessary for healing.
Anti-Blackness in Asian spaces remains a destructive force, fueled by the delusion of white supremacy and a mutual distrust shared by both groups. In the same way that immigrants benefit from Dr. King’s work, I often see us perpetuating the same injustices he fought to eradicate. Photographing in the neighborhood that my relatives called “home” allows me to confront a complex history layered with injustice and solidarity. On one hand, my family resided in this part of the city since the 80s, however, I must recognize my position as an Asian American photographer creating work in a predominantly African American space. When approaching residents for a portrait, the warm interactions and the equally tense ones mirror the nuanced dynamic that my loved ones and their respective neighbors navigated for decades.
The photographic portrait, often contested for people of color, is an opportunity to dialogue with personal and political histories, considering the way that two beautiful cultures collaborated, fought, and forgave in Crenshaw and our resilient home of South LA.
Awarded The 2025 Lenscratch Student Prize, "Between Suns" will be published as Lee's first photobook by Kris Graves Projects (KGP Monolith) in April 2026.
Introduced in 2022, the Candelar is a limited edition set of fine art photographic calendar cards juried through a free one-week open call. The Candelar card sets, printed in-house on Hahnemühle paper by Candela Photographic Arts, can be displayed pinned, clipped, framed, or propped.
