SOUL SEARCHING
Fire-ravaged architectural photographer Leland
Lee, 91, longs to keep alive a four-decade legacy

From the pages of the CA-Modern magazine
By Jack Levitan

Throughout his 40 years as an architectural photographer, Leland Lee had one goal in mind -- to capture the soul of every building he shot. The soul never dies, but photographs are far more fragile. When fire hits, the soul flits up to heaven. Photos curl and burn.

Lee photographed work by some of Southern California's foremost modern architects and designers, including residences by John Lautner, Pierre Koenig, A. Quincy Jones, Edward Fickett, and John Rex.

Lee, 91, a straight-talking man with piercing blue eyes, a calm manner, and easy laugh, succeeded with his camera because he worked hard, approached his photography as an art, and always sought to bring out what was best in the architecture.

He never let anything stop him -- not tough lighting conditions, impossible sites, or tight deadlines -- and he always got the job done with a smile. "He had great presence as a gentleman, a lot of self-respect, and also respect for others," remembers Carole Soucek-King, who edited Designers West magazine from 1978 to 1993 and has been friends with Lee ever since.

Lee also used to store his photography archive in the garage of his Hollywood Hills home. In the 1980s, a ferocious rainstorm sent sheets of water cascading through his garage, destroying much of his archive of negatives, prints, and transparencies, along with copies of the magazines that had published them and his journals. In 2002, completing the job, a fire that began in his car destroyed the rest.

"About 90 percent of my archive was destroyed in the fire, everything except what I had upstairs in the house," Lee recalls. "The car erupted in flames in the middle of the night."

Other men would have cried. The loss was devastating to Lee. "It represents a legacy of what I did during my existence," he says. But rather than despair, he set off on a quest to recreate his lost archive. "Otherwise, all I have left are fragments," he says.

Lee's archive is of more than personal interest. It would serve scholars and fans of modernism as a valuable resource, a record of modern architecture and interior design from mid-century Southern California.

Lee's search is a daunting task that so far has yielded little. But he perseveres with optimism and energy that surprises many. Lee recently drove to the Bay Area from his Los Angeles home for a social occasion -- and to try to find photos he had shot for a San Francisco design firm.

Where other artists might have been devastated by the loss of a life's work, Lee remains philosophical. "Life is so fragile," says Lee, who lost his beloved wife of 55 years two years before the fire. "It can be gone in an instant. People lose everything in a tornado, floods, fire. It's your life that's the most fragile thing of all. I've hung on."

Lee always has.

Life was tough too back in the early 1950s, Lee recalls. After years working in a portrait photography studio in Hawaii, he found himself in Los Angeles with a baby and a wife, who worked days as an elevator operator at I. Magnin. The family was living in Venice in a "minimal, minimal bungalow on the wrong side of the boulevard" -- which they shared with one of Lee's boyhood classmates.

Lee, who was attending the Art Center School to upgrade his photography skills, had already suffered one reversal in his career. His hopes to enter fashion photography had been scotched, he recalls, by the discovery that "the fashion industry is not really interested in aesthetics. They're interested in shock."

Instead, Lee found work "developing blueprints in vats of chemicals."

Then his wife spotted the ad, 'photographer wants assistant,' and Lee's life changed course. Lee called, heard the voice, and recognized it -- Julius Shulman, the well-known architectural photographer whose voice Lee knew because he'd attended a Shulman lecture.

Of course Lee accepted the job -- though he knew little about architecture. "It was economics, see? And of course I knew his reputation," Lee recalls. Lee did have an interest in architecture, however, and had already been introduced to the work of Charles and Ray Eames.

For the next eight years Lee worked as Shulman's "outside assistant."

"I went with him wherever he went and stayed with him while he was out on location. I spelled him while he drove, I set up, packed, developed all the film, took care of supplies." Lee also served as one of Shulman's models and can be seen in some of the master's works.

"Julius had a firm grasp on his stature and reputation," Lee says, "but he was fair and democratic, personally and politically."

Lee still laughs at some of what he saw while working with Shulman, especially shoots with the legendary Richard Neutra. "Neutra, he wanted everything his way," Lee says.

"Many, many times I would be witness to conflict," Lee recalls. "Julius and Neutra were always tugging. Neutra wanted to look through the camera and make sure everything that was bad was hidden. They had a symbiotic relationship. One could not do without the other."

But Lee's true importance is due to the work he did once he went out on his own. His photographs appeared in Architectural Digest, House and Garden, the Los Angeles Times, and many more periodicals and books.

For almost 40 years Lee photographed architecture and landscaping, as well as product shots and more. He shot banks in Los Angeles, tract homes in Santa Clarita, and interiors in mobile homes. He did shoots in Chicago, the East Coast, and overseas.

In the late 1970s Good Housekeeping had Lee focus on film stars and their homes, including Kirk Douglas, Dinah Shore, Burt Reynolds, Cheryl Ladd and, "in a political ploy," he says, Nancy Reagan. Lee shot Mary Tyler Moore's Malibu home, Sonny and Cher's first mansion, and the home of Nancy Reagan's fashion designer James Galanos, with its zebra-skin throws and couture-grade satin covering every surface.

But Lee's tastes ran to modern, and that is where he really made his mark.

Shulman, who died in 2009, and such stalwarts as Ezra Stoller, Roger Sturtevant, Morley Baer, and Ernie Braun are familiar names to fans of modernism today. But consider all the other names that appear alongside photos of modern homes from the 1950s and '60s -- Roy Flamm, Dean Stone, Hugo Steccati, Leland Lee -- photographers whose work deserves recognition as much as does the work of so many of the now-forgotten architects with whom they worked.

Lee regards his work as a form of art -- he still cringes when he sees his photos cropped by someone else -- but one that is in service to its subject. From Shulman, he says, "I learned the importance of recognizing the merits of the architecture, and the mere fact that the architecture itself has its demands. You can't really [photograph] it any other way. It speaks to you.

"The photography should certainly reveal the soul of the house. Every good house has an aspect about it, and your photo needs to speak about that."

Lee, who began his career in the era of bulky flash bulbs, became a master of light -- often in such tricky conditions as the Palm Springs desert, where balancing the harsh exterior glare with the warmer interior can be hard. "But sometimes you want that impact of the environment, that brilliant desert light," he says. "It can be dramatic."

And Lee still recalls one shoot along the Pacific Ocean for a residence designed by Edward Fickett. "The sky was brilliant blue and the ocean was a sheet of cobalt, and the wood complemented it, the redwood. It was a moment! You normally don't get that kind of condition out there. The sky will be pallid, and the ocean looks grey. It made the picture. If you made the same shot under different conditions it would have been dishwater."

Working for Shulman allowed the Lees -- who had two boys by this time -- to move into a rather nondescript home on a steep street above Hollywood. "It was very clean and small, 900 square feet when we got it," Lee recalls. "We kept adding to it. Today it's surrounded by million-dollar houses." The pay was okay, Lee says, but "I didn't want to spend the rest of my life in the shadow of someone as established as Julius."

So at the start of the 1960s Lee went out on his own, forming the Leeside Co. and running it from his home. Contacts with the Los Angeles Times got him work initially. Then he waited. Lee had met everyone in the architectural field while working for Shulman but, he says, "I didn't want to encroach on Julius's terrain."

Then came a call from John Rex, of the firm Honnold & Rex, modernist designers of homes, schools, banks, and offices: "'Leland, I've done this wonderful house up in the country. It's probably one of the best things I've ever done. Everybody is after me [to photograph it], all the magazines want to publish it. I want you to have it.'"

"That was my first big thing," Lee says. "It opened doors. It put me on the map."

The house, designed for Frank and Edith Wyle in 1970, with its double-height, glass-fronted living area and rustic stone fireplace ("contemporary elegance for a working ranch," Architectural Digest called it), required Lee to ford three creeks to reach it.

"It's an interesting but difficult house to photograph because there's a tremendous amount of glass," Frank Wyle says. "To get the light so you don't see it reflected in the glass is quite a trick. And Leland always wanted to get the inside light balanced with the outside light. He'd often wait until just before sundown."

Wyle, who's worked with many photographers during his career, says Lee stood out for his care and attention to detail.

"Setting up his photographs, he would take sometimes a day to get it just right," Wyle recalls about the shoot for his home, which overlooks a country road and a lake. "He would arrange to have someone on horseback come down the road at just the right time. That's the kind of attention to detail you don't often get."

Lee went on to do corporate photography for Wyle, who owned Wyle Laboratories, an aerospace engineering and testing firm.

Another of Lee's favorite projects is the house John Lautner designed for the interior designer Arthur Elrod in Palm Springs. The now-iconic Elrod house, built into the rocks, remains a modern landmark. Lee first photographed the site before the home was built, so he had some idea what Lautner and Elrod were up to.

Still, Lee recalls, when he showed up for the shoot with architectural editor Will Mehlhorn, from House & Garden, "My God, I couldn't believe my eyes! It was gigantic. I thought Arthur was building a bachelor pad. I was flabbergasted."

"I had to send back immediately for more flashbulbs, and you name it -- I had to have some more."

Right away Lee saw one problem that couldn't be solved with extra flash bulbs. "The magnificent side is the cliff side," but there was no way to get there. "I told Arthur, 'I wished I'd had wings!' He hired a cherry picker! He spared no expense."

Lee, who often complains how little time he has for an assignment, spent "all day Thursday, Thursday evening, all day Friday and Friday evening, and Saturday until 6:30," getting it just right. Plus, he returned for shoots several times over the years, as Elrod redid interiors and later brought Lautner in for an expansion.

"That was the most outstanding house by a modern architect I've ever done," Lee says.

In Los Angeles, Lee was part of a lively scene of architects, designers, and design writers, recalls Carol Soucek-King. "When we first met I was just taken by how his clients, the architects and interior designers, just admired him," she says.

"Leland's photographs always seemed so true. He used extra lighting because he said you can't always get what you are trying to show with natural light. But his photos always seemed natural."

"You knew, if someone were bringing you a project photographed by Leland Lee, it would be worth looking at, the project as well as the photography," King says. "He knew such an excellent group of good architects and interior designers. He would never waste your time. He was really good at helping his designers and architects get published because when he called and said he had something, you would say, 'Of course.'"

Lawrence Laughlin, the retired interior designer who helped run the firm Bedell-Laughlin, emphasizes the point. "When you wanted to get your work published in one of the good magazines, you chose photographers they liked and wanted to publish. We always chose people like Leland, and George Szanik, good photographers."

Lee, who was born in San Francisco's Chinatown, lost his father when he was nine, then spent seven years at the Voorhis School for Boys, a top-rank boarding school for disadvantaged youths in San Dimas, near Los Angeles, where he was introduced to photography. "I had an aesthetic bent," he says.

Although Lee is deeply rooted in Chinese culture, his school experience, plus service in the Air Force during World War II that took him to Morocco, India, and China, gave him a multi-cultural perspective. "I've never been tied to any ethnic or social group of any kind," Lee says.

On the whole, he's enjoyed his career, from which he retired when he was 85. He would have kept going, he says, but new, young editors preferred to work with new, young photographers.

Lee's quest to recreate his photography archive has involved calling magazines, his former editors, and designers. "A lot of people for whom I worked are no longer alive," he says, "and a lot of firms went out of business. A lot of people I did a lot of work with, the interior designers, several of them have nothing left. They disposed of their photographs."

But Lee, characteristically, remains hopeful that people who own copies of his photos will respond.

Despite flood and fire, Lee remains a cheerful man. At 91, he amazes King with his continued vitality. He still drives a car and remains a lively conversationalist at her monthly salons on creativity. And Lee has few regrets.

"Each day brought a new surprise," he says of his life. "It was an adventure every time."

For information about Leland Lee, or to help him recreate his archive, reach him at lelandylee@yahoo.com

Photos: Leland Lee, John Eng (images of Leland Lee); and courtesy Judy McKee (Lee-Shulman photo)