As part of a student project in 2016,
Trails: Corky Lee highlights the journey of Corky Lee, a fearless self-taught photographer who dedicated his life documenting the unseen and often ignored struggles of the Asian Pacific Americans community for more than 50 years.
Unfortunately, Corky Lee passed in January 2021 due to Covid,
but his work shall live on.
Corky Lee
1947 - 2021
Lee's work was inspired by an 1869 photo he saw in his social studies text that celebrated the completion of the transcontinental railroad at Promontory Summit, Utah. Its construction had involved thousands of Chinese workers, but the photo depicting representative laborers showed none of them. Hence the inspiration for this project was named Trails, a metaphor of how he uncovered the forgotten trail left behind.
