"Baldwin Lee"

Baldwin Lee was born in Brooklyn, New York and raised in Manhattan’s Chinatown. He studied photography at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.) with photographer Minor White. Later, he would receive an MFA from Yale School of Art, where he studied with photographer Walker Evans. In 1982, Lee became the first Director of Photography within the Art department at the University of Tennessee. The following year, he set out from Knoxville with a 4 x 5 view camera on a journey of self-discovery photographing his adopted homeland – the American South.

Lee’s artistic goal was to partially re-trace and re-photograph the 1930s-40s routes made across the South by his mentor Walker Evans. Unlike Evans’ iconic depression-era photographs, Lee would eventually focus on documenting Black Americans, many of whom were living in poverty on the fringes of society. Over the next seven years, Lee traveled thousands of miles crisscrossing the South, making nearly 10,000 photographs – producing one of the most important visual documents of and about the American South in the past half century.

With this work, Lee had found his primary subject, and credits his many years of working within Black communities throughout the South as having a “political” effect on his life and art. The compassion Lee felt for those he photographed resonates within his work. Although, Lee’s 1980s photographs were known and respected by his fellow photographers and collectors, until recently this work has remained largely unknown and under-appreciated by a wider public.

In the fall of 2022, Hunter’s Point Press published “Baldwin Lee,” a book consisting of the artist’s 1980s Southern photographs. The book has since become an instant classic and was shortlisted as one of the best photo books of 2022 by “Aperture Magazine,” “TIME” and the International Center for Photography. The first edition of “Baldwin Lee” sold out in less than a month and is presently on its third edition of publication. The book’s success led to solo exhibitions at Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York City, Joseph Bellows Gallery, La Jolla, California and David Hill Gallery, London, England. After nearly 40 years, Baldwin Lee is finally being recognized for his groundbreaking work.

The exhibition "Baldwin Lee" will feature a selection of over 50 gelatin silver prints culled from thousands of images Lee made across the South in the 1980s. Many of these photographs will be exhibited for the first time. The exhibition will include compelling portraits of Black Americans, as well as a collection of landscape, cityscape and still-life images that visually encapsulate the Reagan-era American South.

See the exhibit at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art from October 5, 2024 through February 16, 2025.

Photo credit 1: Baldwin Lee, "Untitled," C. mid-1980s, Gelatin silver print, 16” x 20”, Collection of the artist

Photo credit 2: Baldwin Lee "Lula, Mississippi," 1984, Vintage gelatin silver print, 16” x 20”, Collection of the artist, courtesy of Joseph Bellows Gallery