With perhaps two-dozen residents of
the Plant City Convalescent Home arrayed
around the dining room in various states of
wheelchair-bound repose, a diminutive,
gray-haired fellow is standing by a karaoke rig
singing "Lay Your Head on My Pillow." Crooked in
his arm like a football is a poodle named Topsy.
This is precisely the kind of scene that Bud
Lee, picturemaker, would have to
photograph. Kitschy, whimsical, Fellini-esque. I
can just see him stopping in his tracks,
pointing his compact 40-year-old Leica camera,
and clicking away.
But Bud can't do that. Having suffered a
stroke in August, 2003 - it happened at Popeye's
in Plant City, amid a Weekly Planet Best
of the Bay shoot - Bud Lee, 64, is paralyzed on
his left side, blind in his left eye, confined
to a wheelchair.
He wants out of this place. Bad. But for the
foreseeable future this is his home. Bud thrives
on visitors, and lately there have been lots.
His first solo show draws near. From April 17 to
July 10, the Tampa Museum of Art presents Bud
Lee: PictureMaker, a career retrospective of
60 photographs, selected by curator Jill Jiminez
from 500 submitted by Bud's agent, Sergio
Waksman. The images come from Life,
Esquire, Rolling Stone, Town
& Country, the New York Times
Magazine and other high-profile
publications.
"I thought it was important to get different
periods of his career," Jiminez says. "Start
with some earlier pieces and move on to the big
Esquire projects, with celebrities. The
emphasis is on portraits; that's his strong
suit. His humor and irony come into play."
Bud's latest period is best represented in
the Weekly Planet. Enlisted by former
editor Susan Edwards, he began shooting mostly
cover features in 1998. Bud took pictures of
porn stars, down-and-outers and people's
closets, bringing a previously unseen artistry
to the Planet's photos.
He also made quite an impression in our Ybor
City offices. Bud would amble into the editorial
suite, coaxing his bulky frame along, a towel
usually draped around his neck. He'd tell
stories and ask questions in his high-pitched
purr of a voice. He was relentlessly
inquisitive. He didn't always seem dialed in
when an editor laid out the assignment, and he
didn't always come back with what we expected.
But, invariably, his work was full of
personality and, at its best, revealed bare
truths.
Bud looked at every assignment as an
adventure - even ones that, in light of his
illustrious career, could've seemed
insignificant. He knew no caution. In his mind,
everyone wanted their picture taken. He could
take a cantankerous street person and turn him
into an amateur Heidi Klum. "I could get people
to pose in ways that you'd think they wouldn't
want to do," Bud says. "I've been told I'm a
very disarming person. That's part of it. I'm
not afraid of people, not shy. I want them to
look at the shoot as a collaboration."
His wife Peggy Lee adds, "He's a very kind
man, very open and inclusive. At the same time,
I've learned over the years that he has a way of
getting what he wants with all that. That's part
of what makes him very good at photographing
people."
Charles Todd Lee Jr. - he's been called Bud
all his life - grew up in tony Scarsdale, N.Y.,
the son of a career diplomat. He joined the army
in the early '60s and trained as a photo lab
technician. Stationed in Germany, he worked his
way into shooting for military publications. Bud
mustered out in early '67 and within a few
months was shooting for photo-intensive
Life magazine. He lived in Manhattan, but
constant assignments for an array of periodicals
made him a globetrotter.
He joined the federal Artists-in-Schools
program, winding up in Tampa in '76. At a Plant
City school where he was assigned, he met
teacher Peggy Lee Laseter. They married in Ybor
City, and moved into a storefront on Seventh
Avenue, downstairs from a hooker named Black
Mary.
Bud and Peggy Lee became the nexus of Tampa's
underground arts scene, which spawned the wide
open and wildly successful Artists & Writers
Ball, a precursor to Guavaween and Tropical
Heatwave.
Despite his free-spiritedness, Bud always
wanted a brood of kids. By the time Thomas was
born, the family had relocated to Davis Islands,
and when the twins, Parker and Steckley came,
the Lees moved out to Plant City, where they had
Charlotte, the youngest.
Parker, who is working on his masters in
architecture in New York, said growing up with
an unconventional dad didn't seem weird. "He
instilled in us that if you want to do
something, do it," Parker says. "Don't let
someone else tell you you can't do it."
These days, Bud Lee spends most of his days
either in bed or roaming around the nursing home
in his wheelchair. He occasionally sits down at
an easel and paints, and he did get out and snap
a few shots at the Strawberry Festival.
But his rehab has not gone as well as hoped,
Peggy Lee says. Where a few years ago he
might've waxed poetic when talking about one of
his photographs, he now offers up clipped
impressions peppered with long pauses. He
doesn't smile much. Is it because of the stroke
or is he just down? My guess is that it's a
combination of both.
During one of my visits for this story, I
asked The Dumb Question: "So how does it feel to
have your first solo show?"
Bud leveled a gaze at me. "Ah, it sucks big
time."
His lips crooked into a coy smile. A snapshot
of the old Bud.
1965: Bud won Military
Photographer of the Year in 1966 for this shot
that ran in Spearhead, the newspaper of the 3rd
Armored Division. The picture, a standard shot
of soldiers in training, was totally staged:
Bud, who was working as a photographer and photo
lab tech on an Army base in Germany, posed the
GIs and plastered the soldier with mud and
straw. “I got the idea from a fashion magazine,”
he says. “Hiro was one of my favorite
photographers. He used to do extreme close-ups
of faces yelling.” Later a communist newspaper
in Italy presented it as a photo taken in
Vietnam, accompanying a story with an anti-war
slant. “I still feel guilty about winning the
award for that shot,” he says. “It won out over
guys who were being shot and killed. [This
picture] had nothing to do with reality.”
1967: These shots capture
Bud’s first major assignments for Life magazine.
He and writer Dale Wittner were dispatched to
Newark (they rode down in a limo) for one of the
most serious urban riots of the ’60s. The cover
photo (right) is of a 12-year-old boy who got
hit by the spray of a shotgun during a police
pursuit of a looter. The boy survived. “Me and
Dale were talking to these young black guys,”
Bud explains. “It was very hot, so one of them
went in to get beer for all of us. The building
had already been looted. That’s when the cops
showed up. They yelled, ‘Stop!’ but the [older]
kid panicked and ran and they shot and killed
him. It was very sad. We ended up visiting the
[12-year-old] in the hospital and went to see
his parents at their house.”
A week later, Bud found himself in
another riot zone: Detroit. He took the above
photo of a bread line on the outskirts of the
violence. At first, it looks as if the woman is
crying, but a closer examination shows the young
girl in the lower left corner covering her face
as well, prompting the theory that they were
hiding their identities because they didn’t want
to be seen on a bread line. Bud can’t recall the
exact circumstances, but loves the photo’s
emotional power.
1965: “They used to laugh at
me ’cause I was always sent to do one thing and
would always come back with something else,” Bud
says of his editors at the military paper Stars
and Stripes. The museum shot (far left) was one
such serendipitous moment. “They wanted me to
shoot things that were other than military,” he
explains. “I just happened to be at the Louvre.
It’s a very famous painting by Rembrandt. It’s a
surreal scene. It’s a picture of women through
the centuries — the Rembrandt, the nuns; the
girl in the miniskirt was a guide at the museum.
It was a candid shot, [using] available light.
They never knew they were photographed.”
1968: Tennessee Williams wrote
a piece about Key West for Esquire, which
assigned Bud as photographer. He met this woman
(left) while she was working in a bar and
convinced her to come back to an apartment and
pose. She was game. “It didn’t take much to get
her clothes off, no,” Bud says wryly. (She was
wearing shorts, by the way.) He put pillows on
the bottom of a bathtub to raise the woman up,
filled it with water and threw in oranges and
lemons from a nearby tree — dirt, stems and all.
“Her breasts were like the oranges,” Bud says.
He stood on the rim of the bathtub and shot a
roll with his Leica; her blissed-out facial
expression is almost as important to the shot as
her breasts. “I think we gave her $40,” he adds.
“Afterward, she got up, put her clothes on and
went home. I never got her name — I wish I had —
never saw her before or since.”
1976: This
never-before-published photo was taken during
Independence Day festivities in New York. It was
shot from the sand infill next to the Twin
Towers. “What I like about it is that people
literally set up tents and made shelters out of
cardboard boxes,” Bud says. “It was raining that
day. I think they were tourists waiting for the
tall ships to come in, but they looked like
homeless people.” The infill area is now called
Battery Park City, covered with green space and
expensive real estate.
1971: Bud shot album covers
for London Records, including these two
portraits for Al Green’s most popular LP, Let’s
Stay Together. The photographer went with Green
to his hometown in Arkansas for the shoot. The
version that made the cover is below. At right
is an outtake, with Green nude in a cotton
field, holding a fur coat. “I urged them to use
that one,” Bud says. “But [the label] thought
that photo was too racy for the cover.”
1971: For an Esquire piece on
old movie cowboys, Bud shot the original Lone
Ranger, Clayton Moore. When Bud arrived at
Moore’s Los Angeles home, the Lone Ranger opened
the door in full regalia and stayed that way
throughout the shoot. “It was just me and him,”
Bud recalls. “I didn’t set it up; I just
followed him around and shot wherever he wanted
to go. It’s very ’70s — the wallpaper, the puppy
dog portrait, the pink carpet. He drew his gun
spontaneously. He was very serious about the
pose. It shows him as very vulnerable, very
desperate for attention. I liked him a lot, but
I felt sorry for him.”
1999: A photo from Bud’s
Weekly Planet period, and one he’s particularly
fond of. It accompanied a piece about a freak
show in Riverview. “That’s Melvin Burkhart, the
Human Blockhead; he’s dead now,” Bud explains.
“He has pantyhose over his face. He had a
deviated septum, which enabled him to actually
do that with the nail. I had my two daughters
with me. He loved freaking out people.”
1970: When I asked Bud about
his favorite all-time shots, this one of French
filmmaker François Truffaut was the first he
mentioned. It accompanied an Esquire piece about
great movie directors. The assignment also
required him to photograph Federico Fellini and
Michelangelo Antonioni; Akira Kurosawa and
Ingmar Bergman were unavailable. “With Fellini,
I was there for a couple of weeks; I was milking
the expense account some,” Bud says. “He was
shooting Satyricon at the time, or was it
Clowns? Truffaut only had 20 minutes to be with
me, so I only shot him for about 10. It was in
his new office in Paris. He was a very sweet
guy. I love the mystery and the smoke. It’s
ironic: I don’t smoke but some of my favorite
shots have smoking in them.”
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