Texas People, Texas Places: More Musings of the Rambling Boy

23. Russell Lee, Photographer

✥ 23 ✥ Russell Lee, Photographer So m e t i m e b a c k I wrote about two New Deal agencies, the WPA and the CCC, that left a lasting mark on the Texas landscape . There was a third agency, the Farm Security Administration, that also left a legacy in Texas, but it was a legacy of photographs rather than buildings. The FSA, which was created in 1935 as the Resettlement Administration in order to help tenant farmers acquire their own land, had a Historical Section whose job was to make a photographic record of its work. Its photographers, under the direction of Roy Stryker, created an unparalleled record of American rural life. Nothing like it had been done before or has been done since. Stryker, working from an office in Washington, carefully guided his photographers by sending them lists of subjects to photograph, sometimes even suggesting specific shots. The photographers developed their film in the field and sent the negatives to Washington to be printed; the prints were then returned to the photographers to be captioned and then mailed back to Washington. The most famous FSA photograph is Dorothea Lange’s portrait of the migrant mother, but it is just one of 164,000 FSA pictures on file in the Library of Congress. Among those images are five thousand photographs taken in Texas between 1935 and 1943. Five FSA photographers, including Dorothea Lange, worked in Texas. The one who covered the most miles and took the most pictures was Russell Lee, who in February 1939 was assigned by Stryker to document migrant labor, rural health problems, and farm mechanization, three matters of great concern to the FSA, in Texas. Lee was assisted on his Texas trip by ✥ 89 his wife, Jean, who wrote caption notes while Lee was taking pictures , helped develop the film in windowless hotel bathrooms, and kept track of the packages of negatives and prints that went back and forth to Washington. The Lees spent thirteen months in Texas, zigzagging across the state several times. They photographed migrant cotton pickers in the Rio Grande Valley, pecan shellers in San Antonio, oil field workers in Kilgore, cowboys in Spur, a boot maker in Alpine, turkey pluckers in Brownwood, and stock show attendees in San Angelo. Lee felt that his mission was to show how the Depression was affecting rural people, to portray people who were having a hard time. Rather than make single photos, he shot pictures in series, each series telling a story. He used a Graphic press camera with a flash attachment, which enabled him to photograph people in their homes and workplaces. Lee’s photos have the quality of an eccentric family album. He had an open smile that crinkled his whole face and put his subjects completely at ease. Roy Stryker described traveling with him in Minnesota when he stopped to take a picture of an old lady with a peculiar hairdo. Stryker said Lee chatted with the woman for a few minutes and she invited them both to her house for lunch, invited some friends over to have their pictures taken, and fed them supper, too. Lee still had that smile when I knew him in Austin in the 1970s. He told me that when he and Jean were taking pictures on the square in San Augustine, Texas, they encountered a man who was familiar with traveling portrait photographers but had never met a photojournalist. “I don’t have enough money to have my picture made,” the man told Lee, “but I’d like to give you a quarter anyway.” Lee’s San Augustine photographs are among the most remarkable of all of his Texas pictures. He and Jean had gone to San Augustine, an East Texas town of about two thousand people, to 90 ✥ document hookworm, a disease associated with rural poverty. When they arrived, however, they discovered that hookworm was so controversial that the county nurse had nearly been fired for calling attention to it, and she was reluctant to cooperate with them. Lee told me that they were both worn out from travel and that the hotel in San Augustine served delicious meals, so they decided to stay there for a few days and document the whole town. Lee shot about three hundred photos in San Augustine, making it the best-documented small town in America. One series depicts locals with the tools of their trades...