Baldwin Lee

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Minor was a total eccentric, who didn’t hesitate to share his experiences of taking peyote and other psychedelic substances. For 141 pages, the juxtaposition of these remarkable people and these unforgiving circumstances ignites our indignation. We spoke at length about his time with Minor White, and we managed to speak about a few masters like Frederick Sommer, who has influenced us both. Lee’s photographs are so compositionally tight and enjoyable that it’s easy to overlook their subtext, a world of engrained poverty, segregation, and disinvestment. I printed the ones I had the greatest interest in at the time of photographing, rendering the rest to limbo.

He introduced me to the existence of art and showed me that a life in photography was a distinct possibility. 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. White strolled into lectures barefoot and encouraged his often bemused technology students to heighten their awareness of the creative process by practising meditation and reading Zen Buddhist texts.

Baldwin Lee The level of my ambition in pursuing my photography of Black Americans in the South was exceedingly high, but my ambition for recognition was minimal. Lee described his process, in the published conversation with curator Jessica Bell Brown, as beginning with unfolding a map, then traveling one hundred miles away from his home in any direction (“far enough from my known world to be prepared to accept the new”), then culminating with “flawed theater. He wanted to capture some spark of his initial impression, but reforming the exact permutation was impossible.

At the age of seventy-one, having retired from a teaching career of forty years, I felt fulfilled and content. A new book—the first-ever collection of Lee’s work—and a solo exhibition in New York make the case that he is one of the great overlooked luminaries of American picture-making. Must-See Photography Books of 2022: The first collection of remarkable work, made in the 1980s in the American South, by a Chinese-American photographer who, under the influence of Walker Evans, saw his Black subjects with an inherently incisive and compassionate eye. Publisher Barney Kulok plucked eighty-eight images from the nearly ten-thousand black-and-white negatives Lee produced in the eighties.

An exhibition of works by Baldwin Lee will be on view from 22 September to 12 November 2022, at Howard Greenberg Gallery , 14 East 57th Street, 8th Floor, New York, New York. More importantly perhaps, White’s radical ideas about photography – he was a pioneer of abstraction in his own work – were liberating to Lee, who suddenly found the perfect outlet for his own hitherto suppressed creativity.

Baldwin Lee , published by Hunters Point Press, is a collection of 88 black-and-white photographs, mainly portraits. 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. Lugging a heavy 4x5 camera mounted on a tripod, Lee would cover many miles on foot every day, shooting landscapes and interiors as well as portraits.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. Lee’s photographs penetrate to the core, so it’s no surprise his self-examination skills are just as sharp. He expressly gravitated toward the edges of towns “where indicators of success were replaced with the stigma of neglect.