Opinion

A little-known 20th-century photographer’s work is vital to this moment

Lee’s career began when he crisscrossed the United States from 1936 to 1943 on assignment for a government agency called the Farm Security Administration (FSA). He was part of a landmark Depression-era project envisioned by its director, Roy Stryker, to “introduce America to Americans.” The names of many other FSA photographers, such as Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans and Gordon Parks, are well known. Yet Lee, only now coming into wide recognition, contributed 30 percent of the FSA’s massive collection of 63,000 prints.

His unwavering commitment to humanism and photography’s profound role in that pursuit has made him an icon to generations of students at the University of Texas, where he was the first professor of photography. I am one of those former students.

Lee saw photography as a manifestation of our shared humanity. It can freeze a moment in time, revealing an emotion that bonds us all: love, fear, hope, sadness, joy, anger, surprise. That moment can foster connections despite our language, religion, race and cultural differences.

My connection to photography and Lee began in 1977. I was a biology major at the University of Texas at Austin with a newfound photography hobby, leading me to enroll in what I believed was a beginning photography class. I inadvertently registered for a photojournalism class, a mistake that would profoundly change my life.

Embracing this unexpected turn, I found myself immersed in a world where Lee’s influence was pervasive. Older students and teaching assistants emphasized Lee’s mantra: Photographers must preserve the dignity of their subjects and use their work “to help people.” His photographs also reveal unexpected beauty: a group of unemployed men, their hats catching the light on a dreary day, or four young children on Christmas Eve standing in a corner of a primitive home about to eat a meager dinner from a rickety wooden table they can barely reach.

Lee didn’t promote himself very much, said former student Jim Bones. FSA photos were free for use in any publication. “Millions of people were seeing his photographs in popular culture, but his images appeared anonymously, uncredited,” according to Mary Jane Appel, author of a 2021 biography, “Russell Lee: A Photographer’s Life and Legacy.”

Since Lee’s death in 1986, his work has steadily gained recognition. The National Archives exhibit features 200 photographs Lee made in 1946 of coal miners and their families.

There are other places to see Lee’s work, including, improbably, the hallways of an elementary school in Austin that bears his name. The school, originally built in 1939, for decades had a different name: Robert E. Lee Elementary.

Then, in 2016, a groundswell of parents, school officials, former students and a gallery owner began to push for a change, motivated in part by the murders of nine Black church parishioners in Charleston, S.C., by a White supremacist. And so a school named for a Confederate general now honors a photographer who saw humanity in all people.

Lee’s photographs are permanently on display in the hallways. Students there can see images of children from 60 to 80 years ago, a cross-section of race, class and culture. And while Lee didn’t shy away from showing hardships, neither did he avoid showing how life in such places could feel like a celebration.

All of which makes Lee’s work more vital to the moment. Looking at his photographs is an opportunity to see the small details, gestures and expressions that connect us as human beings — and a reminder that the cameras we all now carry in our phones, more sophisticated than any camera Lee possessed, can be used to tell powerful stories.