New Artist: Lee Crum
Lee Crum is a self taught fine-art photographer known for his polysemantic portraits. Crum’s journey to photography began with a job working as a photojournalist for a local Arkansas newspaper while attending the University of Arkansas. Following in the footsteps of the famed Arkansas photographer Mike Disfarmer, Crum moved to New Orleans, picked up a Hasselblad camera, and immediately began shooting musicians, characters and the comings and goings of the people of New Orleans. Soon after, Crum and his photographs of unusual subjects gained national attention landing him jobs with magazines like Esquire, Rolling Stone, Life, and many others.
In addition to shooting major advertising campaigns for the world’s largest brands, Crum continued his personal work documenting most of the important jazz and blues figures of New Orleans during the eighties and early nineties. In the late 1990’s, Crum began working on two projects in Mexico shooting indigenous cultures and landscape nudes throughout the country. Here, Crum produced one of his richest bodies of work to date working with fifty year old modified 4×5 Graflex cameras and the now discontinued Polaroid Type 55 B&W sheet film.
Crum’s studio is now located in Nashville, Tennessee where he is currently editing his image archive for an upcoming book project. In conjunction with the book, Crum is also printing a series of limited-edition archival pigment prints from these selected works.