Russell Lee

Russell Werner Lee was born on July 21, 1903, in Ottawa, Illinois. His childhood was marked by upheaval: his parents divorced when he was young, and after his mother died in 1913 he was raised by a succession of relatives and guardians. He attended Culver Military Academy in Indiana and went on to earn a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering from Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, in 1925.

After working as a chemist and plant manager, Lee grew restless with industry and turned to art, taking up painting in the late 1920s and studying at the California School of Fine Arts and among the artists of Woodstock, New York. He was married to the painter Doris Lee. Lee began using a camera to gather reference material for his canvases, but he soon found that photography itself captured his eye for ordinary life more directly than paint ever could, and he committed himself fully to the medium.

In the fall of 1936, Lee joined the federal photographic project that would define his career, hired by Roy Stryker for the Historical Section of the Resettlement Administration, soon reorganized as the Farm Security Administration (FSA). He replaced Carl Mydans in the unit and quickly became its most tireless field worker. Living largely out of his car and crisscrossing the country from 1936 to 1942, Lee produced far more captioned and printed negatives than any other FSA photographer, building an encyclopedic record of small-town life, farms, migrant labor, and the interiors of ordinary American homes.

Much of Lee's most celebrated work was made in the Southwest. In 1939 he documented the East Texas town of San Augustine and the migrant communities and tenant farmers of Hidalgo County in the Rio Grande Valley. In 1940 he and his second wife, the journalist Jean Lee, who often assisted his fieldwork, spent time in the tiny homesteading community of Pie Town, New Mexico, producing a warm, intimate series, in both black-and-white and Kodachrome color, that became his best-known body of work.

When the FSA photographic unit was absorbed into the Office of War Information and then disbanded, Lee served during World War II with the Air Transport Command, photographing airfields and flight approaches around the world. In 1946 and 1947 he undertook one of the largest documentary assignments of his life, making more than four thousand photographs for a federal survey of medical, health, and living conditions in the bituminous coal industry, work now held by the National Archives.

Lee settled in Austin, Texas, in 1947 and continued to photograph the people and places of his adopted state. In 1965 he helped establish the photography program at the University of Texas at Austin, becoming its first instructor of photography and mentoring a generation of students. Russell Lee died in Austin on August 28, 1986, at the age of eighty-three, leaving behind one of the richest visual records of twentieth-century American life.