| The Collection : Artists : Exhibits : Book Series | |||||||||||
| ARTIST | Russell Lee | ||||||||||
| 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 draftmanship. 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. He worked directly under the creative supervision of Roy Stryker, the head of the Historical Section and the director of photographic projects. During his tenure with the FSA, Russell Lee crisscrossed the United States, documenting rural and urban communities. He specialized in photographic series;his two most famous series from this time are his photographs from San Augustine, Texas in 1939 and PieTown, New Mexico in 1940. Both series are represented in The Russell Lee Collection at the Wittliff Collections. 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. In 1965, the University of Texas at Austin mounted a Russell Lee retrospective exhibition. The Wittliff Gallery has 27 of the panels from the exhibition. The bulk of Russell Lee’s postwar Texas photographs conclude around 1965, when, following his retrospective exhibition, he accepted a position teaching photography at the University of Texas; Lee was the University’s first photography instructor. Although he was still somewhat photo-graphically active after 1965, Lee’s students, not his own work, became his focus until his retirement in 1973. Russell Lee died on August 28, 1986. The Russell Lee Collection at the Wittliff Collections represents the full range of Lee's career and includes photographs, paintings, manuscripts and artifacts, such as camera's. For a complete biographical outline and to search for photographs by Russell Lee, access the Russell Lee Collection website. For a descriptive list of holdings at The Wittliff, access the Russell Lee finding aid. |
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