Man slicing barbecue at the Gonzales County Fair
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Frames ship to U.S. addresses only. Framed prints ship in 2–4 weeks and are final sale. Full framing details
Add Custom Frame
Frames ship to U.S. addresses only. Framed prints ship in 2–4 weeks and are final sale. Full framing details
Add Custom Frame
Frames ship to U.S. addresses only. Framed prints ship in 2–4 weeks and are final sale. Full framing details
Add Custom Frame
Frames ship to U.S. addresses only. Framed prints ship in 2–4 weeks and are final sale. Full framing details
"Today, it's trendy to describe making barbecue as a "craft," and most of the celebrated barbecue craftspeople, particularly in Texas, are white. Man slicing barbecue thankfully challenges that narrative. Gonzales is located in central Texas, in the heart of cattle country. Under contemporary notions of what true barbecue is, one would expect the unnamed subject to be slicing beef brisket. Yet, Man slicing barbecue unapologetically portrays a black barbecue aesthetic. The unnamed subject is an African American man who is focused on breaking down an expertly smoked whole hog into manageable portions, most visibly the spareribs. It's only a matter of time before the subject bathes the barbecue with some sacred concoction contained in one of those pots. Yes, believe it or not, there is more than one way to make Texas barbecue, and as Lee's 1939 photograph shows, sauced, pork barbecue is "old school," even in the Lone Star State." — Adrian Miller, The Soul Food Scholar
Read Miller's full essay over on the blog!
Russell Lee was an American photographer, widely considered the most prolific staff photographer of the Farm Security Administration (FSA). He focused on communities in his photography, telling the stories of different towns through various series of images.
Lee worked as a chemical engineer before he met his first wife, a painter. Her involvement in the arts sparked his and eventually he began working as a photographer full-time. A year after he bought his first camera, he joined the FSA. During his tenure with the agency, he produced more than 5,000 images. The director, Roy Stryker, described Lee as a "taxonomist": he used his camera to carefully document every element of the scenes he encountered. Because of this, his images were more understated than his colleagues Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans, but when put together, his series of images told powerful stories.
After the Great Depression, Lee and his second wife, Jean Smith, began photographing the removal and confinement of Japanese-American citizens. Lee was deeply troubled by what he saw and believed in the importance of documenting the atrocity. For months, he captured the living and working conditions of the labor camps, resulting in the largest collection of images documenting this aspect of the Japanese American wartime experience.
Lee left the FSA in the early 1940s, photographing for Air Transport Command and later the Department of the Interior. He later became a professor of photography at the University of Texas–Austin before his death in 1986.