Baldwin Lee

“I suspect that few are aware of the accomplishments of Baldwin Lee, who, photographing in the South 30 years ago, produced a body of work that is among the most remarkable in American photography of the past half-century.” –Mark Steinmetz, Time In 1983, Baldwin Lee (born 1951) left his home in Knoxville, Tennessee, with his 4 × 5 view camera and set out on the first of a series of road trips to photograph the American South. The subject of his pictures was Black Americans: at home, at work and at play, in the street and in nature. This project would consume Lee—a first-generation Chinese American—for the remainder of that decade, and it would forever transform his perception of his country, its people and himself. The resulting archive from this seven-year period contains nearly 10,000 black-and-white negatives. This monograph, Baldwin Lee, presents a selection of 88 images edited by the photographer Barney Kulok, accompanied by an interview with Lee by the curator Jessica Bell Brown and an essay by the writer Casey Gerald. Arriving almost four decades after Lee began his journey, this publication reveals the artist’s unique commitment to picturing life in America.

Review :
On every possible level, this is an extraordinary body of work: moving, illuminating, troubling, above all humane. Mr. Lee did not frame his photographs to appall, although any minimally empathetic person will be appalled by the conditions they often capture. He framed them in a way that most often features, within the surroundings of brutal poverty, human beings whose expression, gesture or stance insists on their own profound dignity. On a self that is irreducible and irreplaceable. Make[s] the case that he is one of the great overlooked luminaries of American picture-making. The warmth and soulfulness of his work is not the result of intellectual effort; it’s grounded in understanding, a combination of intensity and restraint, and, surely, a shared sense of otherness. I discovered that I was a political being,” he said. He grasped, thanks in part to his own upbringing as the son of Chinese immigrants, the oppressive systems and subtle conditioning that shaped the lives of those he met. He saw his camera less as a propaganda machine and more as a tool to testify that these lives, mundane and epic and “graceful,” mattered. Baldwin Lee is a very radical act of goodness and justice. Because in a country that does not recognise the value of Black lives, especially poor ones, with this monograph, Lee is saying: look over here, America, at this evident failure of equal opportunity and protection. Look very closely at what you don’t want to see, at whom you fail to recognise and celebrate as your own.