Collection is open for research.
Gift of Bette Lee, January 2015 (Lib. Acc. 28434).
Bette Lee was born in Singapore in 1949. She first studied photography while a student at a community college in California. She went on to study photography at San Francisco State University in the 1980s, but dropped out to focus on photographing protest movements in the Bay Area. She came to Portland, Oregon, in 1989, and spent her career photographing protests and marches in that city, including various anti-war protests, the Occupy movement in the early 2010s, and the Black Lives Matter protests in the early 2020s.
Oral history interview with Bette Lee, by Sandy Polishuk, SR 11258, Oregon Historical Society Research Library.
An unprocessed accession of Bette Lee's photographs, Lib. Acc. 28396, is also held by the Oregon Historical Society Research Library.
An additional interview with Bette Lee on the Portland radio station KBOO can be found online at
This oral history interview with Bette Lee was conducted by Sandy Polishuk from June 17 to December 29, 2014. The interview was conducted in two sessions. The interview transcript also includes several of Lee's photographs.
In the first interview session, conducted on June 17, 2014, Lee discusses her early career as a photographer in the San Francisco Bay Area during the 1980s, her involvement with the Livermore Activism Group, and how she began her career photographing protest movements. She speaks about her involvement in activist groups in Portland, Oregon, after moving there in 1989, and talks about some of the protests she photographed. She describes some of the photographs she took of protests and marches around the United States, including anti-war protests during the Gulf War from 1990 to 1991 and the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, and particularly featuring Cindy Sheehan, the mother of a U.S. soldier who was killed in Iraq.
In the second interview session, conducted on December 29, 2014, Lee continues to describe some of her photographs, focusing on those taken in Oregon, including photos of May Day demonstrations, pro- and anti-war marches, and protests against anti-immigration legislation. She also describes photographs of the Occupy Portland movement, and of protests following the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014. She talks about how her photographs document the militarization of police. She closes the interview by discussing the theme of a photo essay that would appear in Oregon Historical Quarterly in 2016.
Copyright for this interview is held by the Oregon Historical Society. Use is allowed according to the following statement: Creative Commons - BY-NC-SA,
Copyright for the photographs included in the interview transcript is held by Bette Lee. Use is allowed according to the following statement: In Copyright,
An article about Bette Lee, "An Activist with a Camera," by Sandy Polishuk, was based on this interview and published in Oregon Historical Quarterly, Vol. 117, No. 3 (Fall 2016), pages 468-485.