RUSSELL LEE
Children of miners...Belva Mine, 1946
Children of miners...West Virginia, 1946
Migrant worker....Lincoln County, Oklahoma, 1939
The Whinery children playing in their house...1940
Russell Werner Lee was born on July 21, 1903 in Ottawa, Illinois. He graduated from Culver Military Academy in 1921 and pursued a degree in chemical engineering from Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, graduating in 1925. He purchased his first camera in 1935 to aid him in painting and draftsmanship and never picked up a paintbrush again. In the fall of 1936, Lee joined the photographic staff of the Resettlement Administration (RA), which was renamed the Farm Security Administration (FSA) in 1937. Both the RA and the FSA were New Deal programs created to assist poor and destitute farmers during the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression. During his tenure with the FSA, Russell Lee crisscrossed the United States, documenting rural and urban communities and leaving a legacy of over 70,000 negatives. In the years following World War II until the mid-1960s, Russell Lee photographed extensively in his new home state of Texas. Concurrent with his work for Standard Oil and J&L Steel, he contributed to magazines such as Fortune, and The New York Times Magazine, and was an associate staff member of Magnum. His work also appeared frequently in The Texas Observer. Lee was the first photography professor at the University of Texas where he taught from 1965 to 1973. Russell Lee died on August 28, 1986. The Wittliff Gallery mounted its own exhibition in 2003 celebrating the centennial of Lee’s birth and created an accompanying catalog with an essay, “Russell Lee: The Man Who Made America’s Portrait” by Mary Jane Appel.
SOURCE “Russell Lee: The Man Who made America’s Portrait” by Mary Jane Appel
PHOTO by unknown photographer, ca. 1942-1945