Back to school we go
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In a few days, students will return to the tidy campus of Lee Elementary in the Harris Park neighborhood.
The Austin school district has confirmed that the art-deco-inspired complex, built primarily in 1939 by the Works Progress Administration, will no longer be named after Confederate General Robert E. Lee. Rather, the school will honor the memory of a famed Austin photographer and University of Texas professor who lived not far away and shared the same patronym.
The controversy about the name change, for the most part, has passed. Although the Austin Historic Landmark Commission recently voted to designate the 1939 construction as historic, the remaining questions seem to be whether to preserve the lettering over the school's entrance and what to do with a bronze plaque.
Despite all this, many Austinites don’t know much about the late Russell Lee (1903-1986), whom Stephen L. Clark, owner of the essential Stephen L. Clark Gallery, has called “the father of Austin photography.”
The best way to get some idea of Lee the man is to view a selection of photos from his wide range of work. (Many more are available in a digital gallery with this story online.)
“The more people know about Russell Lee and his social justice photography, the better,” Alan Pogue, one of the city’s most respected photographers, wrote when we started gathering images. “He was UT’s first fine art photography professor. Documentary photography is a fine art, a difficult art.”
Pogue remind us that Russell Lee was a painter before he was a photographer.
“He knew the difference,” Pogue wrote. “To fully grasp the present moment is a rare accomplishment.”
Lee grew up in Illinois and trained as a chemist. Early on, he recorded unauthorized mining in Pennsylvania and African-American spiritualism. During the Great Depression, he worked for the Farm Security Administration, documenting the plight of farmers in places such as San Augustine, Texas, and Pie Town, N.M.
But his photos record all sorts of things, in a wide variety of settings: Austin youths at a rodeo and livestock show, a shoeshine boy in San Antonio, a couple embracing in an Italian city, the Arabian-American Oil Company pipeline in the desert, pedestrians in the New York City rain, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Baines Johnson campaigning in 1960.
His compositions are compelling, and so are the stories they tell. Often, they show the have-nots rescuing a thread of dignity from what are clearly unfortunate circumstances.
“Russell Lee was a beloved teacher and an interesting man to be around,” Austin writer Dennis Paddle says. “His face wore an expression of constant good humor and self-deprecation. … His photographs were literal and, in a sense, plain in both content and style. To say that he was a pioneer of technique does not stretch the point.”
UT's Briscoe Center for American History holds a substantial Lee collection, including a classic, "Study of the Spanish-Speaking People of Texas," a 1949 effort that revisited his 1939 work for the Farm Security Administration. A Russell Lee show would make a good match for the renovated center and its expanded exhibition space, expected to open next year.
“Russell Lee’s work is an essential American text,” writer Anne Sherwood Hollingshead says. “His was an unflinching eye documenting who we are.”
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