Leland Y. Lee, Architectural Photographer, 1918-2016
Leland Y. Lee, an architectural photographer who overcame racial barriers and helped create iconic images of the American twentieth century built environment, died on February 27, 2016 in Lynwood, California. He was 97.
For four decades, Lee photographed the works of some of the era’s most important architects such as John Lautner, Pierre Koenig, A. Quincy Jones, Edward Fickett, Albert Frey and Buff & Hensman for such leading publications as Architectural Digest, House Beautiful, House & Garden, Good Housekeeping, House & Home, and the LA Times’ influential Home Magazine, among others.
Lee was born Lay Quonn Yuen (”Deep Spring”), the youngest of a family of four children in San Francisco’s Chinatown during the deadly influenza pandemic of 1918. The city was still rebuilding from the great fire of 1906 from which his parents and older siblings had narrowly escaped. His earliest memories are of a home lit by gas lamps and getting around town by horse drawn carriage. His father was a Chinese immigrant and tailor, specializing in brightly colored silk shirts popular with young men who frequented the entertainment district known as the Barbary Coast, home to jazz clubs, dance halls, vaudeville theaters and brothels. Soon after the young Lee could talk, he was translating for his mother who spoke only Cantonese, despite having been a native-born lifelong resident of San Francisco.
Orphaned at eight, Lee was sent to a boys’ camp where an art project of his was published in the San Francisco Call-Bulletin newspaper with the racially insensitive caption “Wong Does It Right”. This proved to be a seminal event and launched a lifelong career in art and photography.
The story in the Call-Bulletin caught the attention of a recruiter for the then-new Voorhis School for Boys, an experimental progressive school for underprivileged youth in San Dimas, California founded by Jerry Voorhis, scion of a wealthy political dynasty who would later serve in Congress. The ten year old Lee was given a scholarship and would become not only a protoge of Voorhis’, but a friend to the entire Voorhis family for the rest of his life. It was at the Voorhis school that Lee first studied photography and developed a love for the craft. The Voorhis school is now part of California State Polytechnic University (Cal Poly Pomona).
Soon after the attack on Pearl Harbor, and after narrowly avoiding relocation to an internment camp for being mistaken as Japanese, Lee was drafted into the Army Air Corps in 1942 and spent the war years serving in Morocco, India, Nepal and China, achieving the rank of Master Sergeant. While in Shanghai, Lee connected with his father’s relatives who introduced him to the woman who would become his wife, Ye Lien, later Americanized to Gracelynn. They were married in Shanghai on June 1, 1946.
After the war, Lee found work in portrait studios and freelancing for commercial assignments before returning to school on the GI Bill to study photography, earning a Bachelor’s degree from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. It was there that he attended a lecture given by the world-renowned architectural photographer Julius Shulman. Shortly after, Lee answered a blind ad in the newspaper for a photographer’s assistant which turned out to be for Shulman. Lee worked as Shulman’s assistant for nearly a decade from 1952 to 1961.
The two worked together on many of Shulman’s most iconic photographs, often with Lee standing-in to provide scale. He is the man standing in a bathing suit by the pool in the 1954 photos of the Albert Frey House in Palm Springs.
He is the man standing at the edge of a cliff under the cantilevered roof of the Stahl House in 1960, Pierre Koenig’s Case Study House #22.
And he is seen riding in the funicular of John Lautner’s Chemosphere House in Shulman’s famous 1961 photo.
The formally-educated Lee had to be diplomatic when making suggestions to the self-taught Shulman and is responsible for introducing his boss to the use of infrared film which was famously used when photographing the Chapel of the Holy Cross in Sedona, Arizona in 1956, adding sharp contrasts, depth and drama to the images. At Julius Shulman’s memorial at the Getty Center in 2009, Shulman’s daughter, Judy McKee, credited Lee for his contributions to her father’s career.
In 1961, Lee struck out on his own. His first solo assignment, for architect John Rex of the Wyle House in California’s Madera County, vacation home to the owner of aerospace engineering firm Wyle Laboratories and parents to actor Noah Wyle, were published in Architectural Digest without attribution or payment, but word of the photographer quickly spread and led to other assignments from architects and editors.
He photographed a hillside house in Silverlake, California by architect Raul Garduno for the Los Angeles Times’ Home Magazine in 1962.
For the next four decades, Lee photographed the homes of the rich and famous from Sonny & Cher, Kirk Douglas and Dinah Shore to Mary Tyler Moore, Ike & Tina Turner, and Ronald & Nancy Reagan. Lee’s most notable assignment came in 1968 when he photographed architect John Lautner’s then latest project, a house for interior designer Arthur Elrod in Palm Springs for House & Garden magazine. Lee was struck by the house’s monumentality with its spiraling circus tent-like concrete roof, indoor-outdoor infinity-edge swimming pool, and natural rock outcroppings that jutted up through the floors or formed walls throughout the interior of the house. Lee had to order out for more film and a boom crane to fully capture the house’s drama. Lee’s photographs led to the house’s use as the villain’s lair in the 1971 James Bond film “Diamonds Are Forever” where two bikini-clad bodyguards wrestle James Bond into the pool.
Twin tragedies struck Lee at the turn of the millennium with the death of his beloved Lyn to breast cancer in 2001, followed by a house fire in 2002 caused by his freshly-serviced car smoldering in the garage, destroying most of his film archive. Lee retired but would remain active attending and participating in art events, lectures, museum and gallery openings including exhibitions of what survived of his own work. He traveled alone on a seven month around-the-world photo safari visiting remote areas of Africa, South America, and the Galapagos as well as the northern reaches of China.
Lee would return to the Elrod House in 2012 at the age of 93 for special celebrations and exhibitions of his photographs as part of that year’s Palm Springs Modernism Show. He was interviewed for publications including Palm Springs Life, Modernism Magazine and Los Angeles Magazine as well as several coffee-table books by Taschen recollecting Lee’s and Shulman’s iconic photographs. Lee remained active and traveled frequently visiting family and friends until late 2015, attributing his longevity and youthful energy to surrounding himself with “young people”.
Lee’s work continues to resurface, discovered in the vaults of defunct magazines, in the backrooms of long-closed galleries, or in the store-rooms of shuttered architectural offices. As with the work of his contemporaries Julius Shulman, Ezra Stoller, and Art Center classmate Pedro Guerrero, Lee’s work serves as a valuable record of a unique time in America’s built environment, when architects reinvented the profession and houses broke all the rules of convention.
What survives or continues to turn up of Lee’s work will be archived at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California.
Lee is survived by his sons Miles and Alexander of Los Angeles; grandsons Erick and wife Stacy of Stevenson Ranch, and Patrick and wife Kelli of San Antonio, Texas; niece Lyena Griffith and husband Jay of Arcadia, California; niece Jeanette (Lawrence) Wong of Chicago, Illinois; nephews Tony Tam of Pasadena and Will Leong of Sacramento and five great-grandchildren, Samantha, Evan, Ava, Katherine and Isabella, and grand-niece Asia.
More about Lee’s photographs of the Elrod House here: http://www.artcrafthomesla.com/ModernismSummer2012-LelandLeecomp.pdf