A photo essay is a story told with pictures, and Russell
Lee's work in this documentary tradition is universally recognized as exemplary.
Without a beginning or end, his photographic stories captured moments of
significance to the people living them and conveyed this information transparently
and directly.
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Lee's images portray children
at school reading and playing. He shows men framing walls, setting type,
trucking off to distant beet fields, standing at attention, and bowing
their heads. Women are seen tending to the sick, teaching, attending
to the politics of the day, washing and cleaning. The images tell the
story of children growing up, families coping, and the creation of a
burgeoning middle class. When viewed together, the photographs reveal
the coexistence of creativity, resourcefulness, accomplishment, and solidarity
with inequality, dislocation, and inadequate basic financial and physical
support systems.
Lee's photographs for the Study of the Spanish-Speaking
People of Texas captured what he saw in Corpus Christi, San
Antonio, San Angelo, and El Paso in 1949. His wife—journalist
Jean Smith—gleaned additional details from conversations with
individuals as Lee photographed them. This information and more gathered
from the community was recorded in a log, with each frame of film identified
by a unique number in the log. Through the log, the pictures were linked
to specific socioeconomic conditions, addresses, families, and in many
cases individuals, thus enhancing both their immediacy and their usefulness
to researchers. When the notation "killed" appears in the log it indicates
that Lee did not intend to print that specific image and therefore
did not provide any identifying information for it. For this presentation,
all reproducible frames that Lee shot for the project were included in order to provide researchers as complete a set as possible. The image captions were taken verbatim from the logs.
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