Lee Crum
(American, b. 1954)

Lee Crum is a self-taught fine art photographer born in Little Rock, Arkansas. Over a 45-year career his work has been largely focused on the subject of portraits, both environmental and studio.

Crum began working as a photojournalist in 1975 while attending the University of Arkansas and soon after, he would arrive in New Orleans. The cast of characters in his newly adopted city inspired him to make more deliberate portraits in the vein of Arkansas photographer Disfarmer. He picked up a used Hasselblad camera with two lenses and began shooting musicians, characters, and the hoi polloi of New Orleans. Gaining national attention with his pictures of unusual subjects, Crum suddenly became an in-demand photographer for magazines like Esquire, Rolling Stone, Life, and many others. In the late eighties, Crum would begin shooting major advertising campaigns for the world’s largest brands. This detour turned into a grueling 15-year odyssey of non-stop travel.

Crum’s personal work, however, would remain the driving force in his career. He documented most of the important jazz and blues figures of New Orleans, where he lived, through the 80s and early 90s. In the late 90s, he began working on a project in Mexico shooting landscape nudes and indigenous cultures using bulky and often finicky Graflex cameras. These fifty-year-old, large format cameras were modified and Crum used a now-discontinued black and white negative film to produce large, moody, silver-laced negatives. He has often said that traveling throughout Mexico during those years was absolutely the most rewarding experience of his career.

Crum has largely recorded his images in medium format, and his particular love for the square format version has never wavered. Looking through the confines of the perfectly boxed viewfinder allowed him to adopt a personal style of portraiture.

Combined with his use of dramatic lighting and unforgiving sharp lenses, he captures the spirit of his subjects without apology. These stylized visual elements have defined his look, but the single element most present in his work is simply humanity.

Crum currently lives in Nashville, TN and spends his time in his studio honing his printmaking skills to produce large pigment prints or working on one of his many current projects, such as editing and preparing an upcoming book.