Baldwin Lee

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Browsing through the stellar examples included, one can almost sense the ghosts of Minor White and Walker Evans, one perched on each shoulder of Lee. The vintage prints are sized roughly 15×19 inches (or the reverse), and two larger modern prints are shown at 32×40 inches, in editions of 6+2APs. 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. The travelling, the cheap hotels, the long days drenched in sweat, the fact that I had very little money.

Arriving almost four decades after Lee began his journey, this publication reveals the artist's unique commitment to picturing life in America. Whatever happened everywhere else in the country and in the world was far away and out of sight, out of mind. I wanted them to be open ended and subject to the many different interpretations that people brought to them. Since then, Lee has happily worked as a professor of art at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.His review of ten thousand digitally scanned negatives resulted in the eighty-eight images in the book. Lee made these images conscientiously, knowing that there was no way to circumvent the charged and often ugly history of this American panorama. 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. For all that, the experience of travelling in the deep south shook him up and sharpened his sense of injustice. Based on the Eye Mama Project, a photography platform sharing a curated feed by photographers worldwide who identify as mamas, the Eye Mama book brings together more than 150 images to render what is so often invisible―caregiving, mothering, family and the post-motherhood self― visible.

For the young Lee, who had lived “a very insular life” in Chinatown, White’s presence was transformative. Episode 319: Baldwin Lee is an American photographer whose recent eponymous book was published by Hunters Point Press. There is an atmosphere of languor throughout, the sense of time slowed down by the intense heat and humidity of the south and the weight of too much time spent killing time. In another image, a young woman clutching an infant to her breast stands on a rickety porch, cocking her head slightly, her lidded eyes inquisitive, as though she’s trying to metabolize being considered even as she’s posing. As described in several revealing comments to Brown, Lee’s photographs often involved interaction and arrangement.For seven years in the 1980s, Chinese-American New York photographer Baldwin Lee cut an eccentric figure around the Southern states of the USA. To the contrary, since none of this attention was sought, not only was I surprised but moreover amused. Lee, born to Chinese immigrants in New York, moved to Tenessee to develop a photography program in the early 80s for the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, where he continues to teach. We discussed how he found his way to the South and started photographing African Americans in the greater South. 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.

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. The youthful subjects often appear stern-faced and self-awarely poised; the adults often appear weary, propped against trees and telephone poles and trucks. Lee’s work has little secondary market history at this point, so gallery retail likely remains the best option for those collectors interested in following up. A photograph like “DeFuniak Springs, Florida, 1984”, for example, seems so casually choreographed it might have fallen from the sky. Second, he says he woke up one day to find himself on the wrong side of the line that separates witness from voyeur.

BL Upon completion of my MFA I was appointed to the faculty of the Yale School of Art in 1975 where I served until 1979. His seminal series, The Dream Collector, depicts Tress’s interests in dreams, nightmares, fantasies, and the unconscious and established him as one of the foremost proponents of magical realism at a time when few others were doing staged photography. Swagger and sorrow in the eyes of almost every young Black man, including the one who stars in the book’s opening spread. BL The ambitions I had for my work at the time of its making did include—although in a fairy-tale way—a wider audience, but the urgency to make this happen never occurred.

He’d since stopped photographing altogether, comfortably ensconced in Knoxville where since 1982 he’d taught at the University of Tennessee.One can only guess his initial shock visiting small communities, and realizing that they divided into Black and White halves, separated by race, income, and living status as cleanly as a Minor White composition. Lugging an ancient wooden large-format land camera (the kind with a black cloth that you disappear under), Lee would set up his awkward tripod and take pictures. Cattle gather precariously near an open pit, while in another frame kudzu threatens to swamp every edifice. Baldwin Lee, now seventy-one, grew up in the insular enclave of New York City’s Chinatown and, fulfilling his parents’ expectations, went to MIT in the late 1960s to study science and technology.