Baldwin Lee

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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. I was content with enough exhibitions and public events to maintain my position as a college faculty member. Lee does not hit us over the head with his “righteous indignation”, as Gerald describes it in his essay, Insistent Life . 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. The large format means that every detail is there to explore: a young man protectively puts a hand on a stack of four cassettes on the hood of a car; a kid provocatively presents a dollar bill to Lee’s lens, a battered Diana Ross gatefold LP teeters atop a totem pole of TVs and hi-fi, as a stern little girl stares us down.

That scarcity makes his images even more remarkable for the access Lee gives us to the past, and for the complexity they add to the cultural conversation today.He was also the first openly gay man I had encountered and at a time when it was difficult and complicated for someone like him to navigate in the world. In parallel, a solo exhibition of Lee’s work on view at Howard Greenberg Gallery this fall presents thirty photographs from the book.

MS Was it then never your intention to share this work with others in a large way, not even in your thirties? This richly illustrated volume is the first critical look at the early career of Arthur Tress, a key proponent of magical realism and staged photography. As was true for most of the other towns in that part of the state, its economy was based on agriculture and the pace of life was slow and comfortable.

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. 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. A follow up show will be on view at Joseph Bellows Gallery in La Jolla from October 22 to December 10, 2022 ( here).

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 subject of his pictures was Black Americans: at home, at work and at play, in the street and in nature.

On the journey home from his graduation ceremony, Lee told his father he was going to pursue photography. Bringing together works from his groundbreaking monographs including Surfers, Yes Rasta, Trenchtown Love and Gypsies, Patrick Cariou: Works 1985–2005 (published by Damiani) takes us on a scenic journey around the world, offering an intimate and captivating look at cultures that distance themselves from the blessings and curses of modernity. Lee gave his subjects stage direction, but there could be no orchestration of the world around them.

Gerald himself notes that there is “so much similarity between Black life and the lives you see in these thirty-year-old images, a few outfit changes notwithstanding. At the beginning of his placement, Lee—a first generation Chinese American—set off to explore the shambling corners of the American South. 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. Arriving almost four decades after Lee began his journey, this publication reveals the artist’s unique commitment to picturing life in America. The subject of his pictures were Black Americans: at home, at work, and at play, in the street, and among nature.Here and there, though, a few portraits seem to carry a subtle metaphorical charge: a young man in shorts and T-shirt, his hand outstretched above him to grasp a coiled rope dangling from a tree; four young children holding hands beneath an ominously towering federal courthouse that looms out of the encroaching darkness. In early 1982, he interviewed for a position at the University of Tennessee, noticed the beautiful flowers everywhere and the absence of snowbanks, and accepted the position he was offered to initiate their photography program. 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. There is a lot at stake there for some people when they suddenly see an outsider, especially an outsider with a camera. Like sedimentary rock laid down over millennia, each layer provides the foundation for later movements to build upon in series.