Bud Lee (1940-2016) is a great American photographer whose work has somehow been overlooked. A prolific contributor to Esquire, Life, Rolling Stone, and other magazines in the late 1960s and early 1970s, who regularly ran extensive portfolios of his work, he took iconic photos of figures as varied as Warhol’s Factory and its superstars, Tennessee Williams, Al Green, James Brown, ZZ Top and Norman Rockwell. Lee covered the Newark riots, and the funerals of Robert Kennedy Jr and Martin Luther King Jr for Life, trailed transgender performance troupe the Cockettes from San Francisco to New York for their ill-fated off-Broadway debut, and shot production stills on the set of Fellini’s Satyricon, Alice’s Restaurant, and Fiddler on the Roof.

Lee ‘retired’ from magazine work in the early ‘70s and and moved to Iowa, where he founded the Iowa Photographers’ Workshop, as a companion program to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He later moved to Tampa, Florida, where he married art teacher Peggy Howard and started a family. He became very active in the local arts scene around Tampa, Ybor City and Plant City, helping to stage a number of outrageous happenings, as the Artists and Writers Ball, an annual themed costumed ball that harnessed the same freaky anything-goes energy had had experienced in the company of the Cockettes and on Fellini’s movie sets. An aspiring filmmaker, Lee also shot a no-budget remake of Gone With The Wind with a cast entirely made up of children from local schools.

In August 1970, Lee turned his lens on Iggy Pop while attending one of the Stooges’ legendary shows at Ungano’s in New York, which was recorded by Stooges A&R, Danny Fields, heavily-bootlegged, and reported on extensively by underground rock magazines like CREEM. During the show, backstage, and even at Iggy’s digs in the Chelsea Hotel, Lee took a series of incredible, candid photos of the Stooges frontman at the very height of his ‘Ig’-ness. A few were published in a short-lived underground magazine entitled Earth (as seen here). Most have never been seen.
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cover of the short-lived Earth magazine.