Russell Lee (photographer)

Russell Lee

Russell Lee (1903, Ottawa, Illinois - 1986, Austin, Texas) was an American photographer and photojournalist.

Lee had trained as a chemical engineer, and in the fall of 1936 became a member of the team of photographers assembled under Roy Stryker for the federally sponsored Farm Security Administration documentation project. Lee is responsible for some of the iconic images produced by the FSA, including photographic studies of San Augustine, Texas in 1939, and Pie Town, New Mexico in 1940.

After the FSA was defunded in 1943, and after his own service in World War II, Lee continued to work under Stryker, producing public relations photographs for Standard Oil of New Jersey. Some 80,000 of those photographs have been donated by Exxon Corporation to the University of Louisville in Kentucky. Lee moved to Austin, Texas in 1947 and became the first instructor of photography at the University of Texas in 1965.

Selected photographs

• 
  Conversation at the General Store, Louisiana, 1938
• 
  Cajun fiddler
• 
  Hot orchestra performs specialty number
• 
  Resting farmer
• 
  Shop window
• 
  Segregated facilities, 1939
• 
  Drawing water from a hand pump, Oklahoma City
• 
  Old man born in slavery displays the horn formerly used to call slaves
• 
  Llano de San Juan church, New Mexico, 1940
• 
  Serving food in Pie Town
• 
  Quilt, Pie Town
• 
  Shasta Dam under construction, 1942
• 
  Montana shepherd
• 
  U.S. Airman
• 
  Japanese American internment
• 
  Snake handling in a Kentucky church, 1946

External links

• Biographical Sketch of Lee
• Online Russell Lee collection
• Finding Aid for the Russell Lee Photograph Collection held at the Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin
• Spanish Speaking People of Texas (Series of Russell Lee Photographs from the Russell Lee Photograph Collecion)
• He Was a Camera (Texas Monthly Magazine Article)
• Article about Lee at the University of Texas website
• Flickr Photostream: LOC's Archive of Russell Lee's FSA Photos