EVERY PICTURE TELLS A STORY

EVERY PICTURE TELLS A STORY A PORTFOLIO BY RUSSELL LEE

High school students cross Van Buren Street in front of the Nifty Nook, a restaurant on the southeast corner of Van Buren and Seventh streets in Phoenix. Behind the restaurant is the Monroe School, a historic building that today is the home of the Children's Museum of Phoenix.

HERE ARE MORE THAN 60,000 IMAGES in the Library of Congress' Farm Security Administration collection, and Russell Lee captured 19,000 of them. As the most prolific of the FSA's traveling photographers a roster that also featured Dorothea Lange, Arthur Rothstein, Marion Post Wolcott and Walker Evans - Lee documented the lives, conditions, surroundings and situations of everyday people between 1936 and 1942. To do it, he lived out of his car while traveling to 29 states, including Arizona.

While Lee's work focused heavily on working-class Americans and people in poverty, particularly during the Great Depression, his own upbringing was significantly more gilded. Born in Ottawa, Illinois, in July 1903, Lee attended Indiana's Culver Military Academy, a prestigious college preparatory high school that boasts such other notable alumni as actor Hal Holbrook and former New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner. After high school, Lee earned his degree in chemical engineering from Pennsylvania's Lehigh University but ultimately grew tired of the field. So, he turned his focus to painting, using his camera to capture studies of his subjects.

By the time he was hired by the FSA in 1936, Lee was all in on photography. Among his most famous works for the project were images of homesteaders and their crops in Pie Town, New Mexico; shots of shopkeepers and the train station in San Augustine, Texas; and the photographs that appear in the following pages - all from Arizona in the early 1940s.

After his stint with the FSA, Lee went to work for the Air Transport Command and the U.S. Department of the Interior, as well as for several public relations campaigns. In 1965, he became the first photography instructor at the University of Texas. He died in Austin, Texas, in August 1986.

CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: The facade of the Phelps Dodge Mercantile Co., a sign of the mining company's influence, dominates a street scene in Bisbee. Mining now is a thing of the past in this Southeastern Arizona city, but this building is still standing and is home to the Bisbee Coffee Co. and other merchants.

Beer and hot breakfast options are among the offerings at a tourist camp in Roosevelt, a Gila County destination. Roosevelt is on the south side of Theodore Roosevelt Lake; today, it has a population of about two dozen.

Guests at a dude ranch in Coolidge cool off in the large swimming pool. Dude ranches became popular in Arizona after World War I, when falling cattle prices led ranchers to seek alternative sources of income.

A Maricopa County farmer delivers feed to a dairy herd via horse-drawn cart. The cattle industry remains an important component of Arizona's economy today.

CLOCKWISE FROM ABOVE: Several modest buildings define a view of Concho, a small community west of St. Johns in Northeastern Arizona.

Outside the Texaco station, Concho's teenagers board a bus to the high school in St. Johns.

Lee spent significant time in Concho, photographing sights such as this store and gas station. Today, only about 50 people live in Concho.

LEFT: A lamppost shaped like a saguaro cactus decorates a street corner next to one of Phoenix's most enduring landmarks, the Westward Ho. The lamppost was based on a design by Reg Manning, longtime artist and editorial cartoonist for The Arizona Republic.

TOP: Desert plants line the entrance to a Phoenix auto court. Such lodging destinations grew in popularity as more and more Americans began driving after World War I.

ABOVE, LEFT: Members of an orchestra play outside a Phoenix grocery store on a Saturday afternoon. The practice was intended to get potential customers to enter the store.

ABOVE: Encanto Park's band shell is shown a few years after its 1937 construction as part of a New Deal project. The structure hosted numerous performances before it burned to the ground on New Year's Eve in 1986.