Baldwin Lee

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He’d been culturally isolated as a youth, immersed in New York’s Chinatown with little exposure to the greater art world, nor deeper American currents of generational inequalities and racial strife. In parallel, a solo exhibition of Lee’s work on view at Howard Greenberg Gallery this fall presents thirty photographs from the book. BOMB Magazine names that cookie “CraftSessionId” by default, but it can be renamed via the phpSessionId config setting. Did you come across images you hadn’t thought much about before or see any of your old work in a different light?

During several road trips between 1983 and 1989, Lee documented African Americans living, playing, loving and surviving, often amid the grinding poverty one might associate with an impoverished nation or another era – anywhere but America, one of the wealthiest nations on the planet. From there, his portraits and lifestyle photos were published all over the world, in pretty much every major magazine and media out there, including The New York Times, BBC, National Geographic and more. I had become a reprehensible human being—the kind of person for whom I had no respect—who was delighting in the suffering of another. The subject of his pictures were Black Americans: at home, at work, and at play, in the street, and among nature.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.

Several years ago, a treasure trove containing some 6,000 original Bob Dylan manuscripts was revealed to exist.

The act of asking for permission, of confronting this angst, transfigured the relation between photographer and subject.

At lunchtime, we would go out to eat at the Brown Derby, Musso, and Franks, or some other local restaurant, and I got to observe all the activity that was occurring on Hollywood Boulevard. But Lee’s southern exposure wasn’t overwhelmingly white, as it was in Evans’s classic "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. For all that, the experience of travelling in the deep south shook him up and sharpened his sense of injustice. The images reflect the artist's eagerness to assimilate back into a home that feels at once foreign and familiar. No missing or damaged pages, no creases or tears, no underlining or highlighting of text, and no writing in the margins.

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 photographs of interiors especially confirm this: the details of disrepair, be it clipped-together curtains or discolored walls, never overwhelm the portrait subject, and in fact endear them to the viewer even more for being so candid. The exhibition Baldwin Lee coincides with the publication of a new monograph of his work by Hunters Point Press in New York. A flooded field with a house plopped in the middle leaves you fearful that the family inside needs to survive on what it yields.Lee told Gerald that he did not enter this project on a do-gooder’s mission, but he was undoubtedly aware that his photographs told a story that America would prefer not to broadcast. Although the communities Lee captured are overwhelmingly poor, there is more to see in Baldwin Lee than just poverty because there is more to human beings than their station in life. His story is a singular and surprising one, all the more so because the recent acclaim that has followed the rediscovery of his body of work is, he insists, of little consequence to him.