Lee, Russell, 1903-1986

Russell Lee (1903-1986), American photographer, was born in Ottawa, Illinois. He worked for the Farm Security Administration during the Great Depression.

Russell Werner Lee (July 21, 1903 – August 28, 1986)[1] was an American photographer and photojournalist, best known for his work for the Farm Security Administration (FSA) during the Great Depression. His images documented the ethnography of various American classes and cultures. The son of Burton Lee and his wife Adeline Werner, Lee grew up in Ottawa, Illinois. He attended Culver Military Academy in Culver, Indiana, for high school. He earned a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering from Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.[2]

Lee started working as a chemist, but gave up the position to become a painter. Originally he used photography as a precursor to his painting, but soon became interested in photography for its own sake. He recorded the people and places around him. Among his earliest subjects were Pennsylvanian bootleg mining and the Father Divine cult.[3] In the fall of 1936, during the Great Depression, Lee was hired for the federally sponsored Farm Security Administration (FSA) photographic documentation project of the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration. He joined a team assembled under Roy Stryker, along with Dorothea Lange, Arthur Rothstein, and Walker Evans. Stryker provided direction and bureaucratic protection to the group, leaving the photographers free to compile what in 1973 was described as "the greatest documentary collection which has ever been assembled."[2]

Over the spring and summer of 1942, Lee was one of several government photographers to document the forced relocation of Japanese Americans from the West Coast. He produced more than 600 images of families waiting to be removed and their later lives in various detention facilities, most located in isolated areas of the interior of the country.[4]

After the FSA was defunded in 1943, Lee served in the Air Transport Command (ATC). During this period, he took photographs of all the airfield approaches used by the ATC to supply the Armed Forces in World War II. In 1946 and 1947, he worked for the United States Department of the Interior (DOI), helping the agency compile a medical survey in communities involved in mining bituminous coal. He created over 4,000 photographs of miners and their working conditions in coal mines.[5] In 1946, Lee completed a series of photos focused on a Pentecostal Church of God in a Kentucky coal camp.[6]

While completing the DOI work, Lee also continued to work under Stryker. He produced public relations photographs for Standard Oil of New Jersey.[2]

In 1947 Lee moved to Austin, Texas, and continued photography. In 1965 he became the first instructor of photography at the University of Texas there.[2]

Legacy
Lee's work is held in collections at the University of Louisville, the New Mexico Museum of Art,[7] Wittliff collections, Texas State University;[8] the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin,[9] and the Library of Congress.[10]

In 2016, Lee Elementary, a school in the Austin Independent School District, was renamed Russell Lee Elementary in honor of the photographer.[citation needed]

Russell Lee was born in Ottawa, Illinois on 21 July 1903. His childhood, although of comfortable middle-class rural American heritage, was marred by tragedy. His parents were divorced in 1908, when Lee was five, and his mother was killed in an accident in 1913. Lee was then passed between various relatives and guardians until he returned to Ottawa to be raised by family friends. He became interested in photography in 1931 while married to his first wife, artist Doris Emmrick. She introduced him to art, which he then took up seriously. Dissatisfied with his artistic accomplishments, however, Lee bought himself a camera and began taking pictures. During the early 1930s he took photographs of the destitute and homeless, and of the artistic community in Woodstock, New York, where he lived.

Lee pioneered the "photo essay" approach to photography, producing photographic documentaries. In 1936, he joined Roy Stryker's Resettlement Administration Project, which became the Farm Security Administration (FSA) in 1937. The Project's directive was to use photography to create a social awareness of America's rural problems during the depression years. During this time he traveled away from home for up to nine months at a time, photographing and documenting rural America. He and Doris Emmrick were amicably divorced, and Lee later married Jean Smith, who became his partner.

On behalf of the FSA, Lee traveled to Texas, New Mexico, California, and Arizona. His most famous portrayals are of people pursuing their everyday lives in San Augustine, Texas (1939) and Pie Town, New Mexico (1940). He was a pioneer in the use of flash for indoor photography, capturing indoor images as well as the more usual outdoor scenes.

During World War II, Lee photographed airstrips for the U.S. Air Transport Command in the Far East, but did not remain in the service once the war ended. He spent some time documenting the living and working conditions of coal miners for the Interior Department between 1946 and 1947, and then took on industrial assignments. In 1965, Lee began a new career as an educator in the Department of Art at the University of Texas at Austin. He died on 28 August 1986 in Texas.