Audio Tour - Facing the Lens

Harrison Photography Gallery 365

1207 - Wellington Lee
From the video "Wellington Lee: 60 Years of Artistic Photography," 1999

Wellington Lee
American, born China, 1918-2001
Myself and I, 1948
Gelatin silver print
Gift of the artist 93.35.5

Wellington Lee was one of the world's most exhibited and beloved pictorialists, working from before World War II until the 1990s, long after the pictorialist movement had waned. He moved to the United States when he was about eighteen, and settled in New York for the rest of his life. Lee won a large cash award for his first-place color photograph in a Popular Photography competition, with which he opened a portrait studio in Chinatown in 1950. Lee was most revered for his posterized color images, for which he used an original process, and his pictures of female figures, both nude and clothed. The latter were highly fabricated fantasies, using strange props and exaggerated poses. This unusual self-portrait shows him in a double exposure, building small structures with traditional mah-jongg tiles.