Baldwin Lee (b. 1951) is a Tennessee-based photographer and former university professor of photography.

He studied with Minor White at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and received a Bachelor of Science in 1972. At Yale University, he studied with Walker Evans and was given the opportunity to print Evans’s photographs. Lee received a Master of Fine Arts in 1975. After teaching photography at Yale and the Massachusetts College of Art, he inaugurated the photography program in 1982 at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, where he was a professor for over three decades. 
His work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Knoxville Museum of Art; The Art Museum, University of Kentucky, Lexington and In New York, his photographs are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Morgan Library and Museum, and Museum of the City of New York.

In 1983, the photographer Baldwin Lee left his home in Knoxville, Tennessee, and set off on a road trip through the American South. He did not know what his subject would be, but during the trip, he found himself drawn to photographing Black Americans at home, at work and at play, in the street and amid nature. Over the next seven years, he made numerous road trips to the South to continue his work. He returned with images so poignant and piercing, the Museum of Modern Art in New York acquired his photographs. 

Nearly 40 years after Lee’s initial 2,000-mile road trip, the first solo exhibition of his work in New York will be on view at Howard Greenberg Gallery through November 12, 2022. The exhibition Baldwin Lee coincides with the publication of a new monograph of his work by Hunters Point Press in New York in September. 

Embracing the Photographer’s Bane and Blessing: The Search for Raison D’être

By Baldwin Lee 

Ten years after having studied with Walker Evans, I positioned my tripod in precisely the same location from which he made the iconic photograph Greek Revival Building, Natchez, Mississippi in 1935. This structure, a shrine to the cotton wealth generated from the labor of enslaved people, was built in 1833. I took refuge underneath a heavy black cloth used to provide the darkness necessary to view the dim upside-down image projected on the ground glass of my view camera and paid homage by taking my own picture. 

The bane and blessing of being a photographer is that you can aim the camera at anything. Evans came to Natchez under the auspices of Fortune magazine and the WPA, with his subject assigned—the everyday lives of the Depression. Fifty years later, I arrived, with my subject still to be discovered. My first trip south yielded three hundred photographs—and my raison d’être as an artist: to photograph the life and lives of Black Americans in the post–Jim Crow era. 

A vastly different world existed in New York’s Chinatown thirteen hundred miles northeast, where I grew up. My parents, having immigrated from China after World War II, raised my siblings and me in a tenement building photographed and made famous by Jacob Riis in How the Other Half Lives (1890). It was not a ghetto to me—it was my world, an enclave independent of the rest of New York. Non-Chinese were rare; the primary school where I learned English was entirely Chinese except for two. Even though New York was multiethnic, my homogeneous haven obviated the need to know about race as a child. 

The crucial component of my tertiary education was thus not the curricula at MIT and Yale but my introduction to those who, because of race and class, were privileged. I was unaware of the difference between WASPs and Jews and did not know the hierarchical positioning of the Irish with the English; trust funds, Andover and Exeter, and country clubs were all new to me. This new world showed me the arbitrariness of privilege and the interdependence of race and racism. It recast how I understood my youth in Chinatown and oriented me toward justice in an unequal world. 

After my education, I moved to Tennessee in 1982 for a teaching position. With the South still unknown to me, I traced a rectangle on a map with Knoxville, Memphis, New Orleans, and Tallahassee at the corners. During my first two-thousand-mile drive into the rectangle, I pointed my camera at anything and anybody. I photographed structures, landscapes, still-lives. I took pictures of people–old and young, black and white, well-to-do and poor. I set up my camera in urban and rural places. I photographed in public and private spaces. I made images of interiors and exteriors. I worked during the day and night. I wanted to be certain to explore all possibilities—embracing the photographer’s bane and blessing. Upon the completion of the trip, I had a revelation: in my pictures of Black southerners, the camera aligned my own conviction of what matters with the life and lives of those who matter. In this photographic alignment of what is important, and the personal engagement that produced them, I found what every artist covets—my raison d’être. 

On that first trip to Natchez, I found myself on a road running north from Main Street past the cemetery. Eventually it narrowed, with the pavement turning to ruddy hard-packed dirt. Suddenly the most glorious scene unfolded: chickens scrambling across the road and goats vaulting from one mound of tires to another. This performance was embraced by the most beautiful wisteria arbor I had ever seen. The flowering portal led to a startling pink stucco house. I pulled over and with camera and tripod on my shoulder, passed underneath the arbor and knocked on the door. An elderly man, thin and shirtless, opened the door. I apologized for my forwardness and offered him the excuse that the chickens, goats, and his wisteria were irresistible. He introduced himself as Robert Fulton. 

Mr. Fulton led me behind his house, which afforded a view of terrain consisting of steeply undulating hills. At the site of a small orchard of pear trees, he described how he, during the period Evans photographed in the South, planted these trees to thwart the possibility of famine. Lamenting the effect of violent summer rainstorms, Mr. Fulton was driven to fight erosion with hand tools and resolve. He embedded corrugated sheet metal and countless tires into the landscape to divert runoff from storms. When questioned about the ownership of this property, he told me, to my astonishment, he did not own this land. In response to my question about his motivation for his tireless labor, he replied, “God put this land here and God put me here. That is why I work.” 

Excitement welled as I requested permission from Mr. Fulton to photograph him and his property. Permission is crucial to the physical act of making a photograph. My favorite and most fruitful assignment as a teacher was to have students take pictures where permission had to be granted by an entity or person who possessed jurisdiction. Students hated this assignment; it demanded abandonment of comfort and capitulation to unease. But acceding to discomfort resulted in making photographs that exceeded expectations. Even more importantly, it augmented their self-image as artists by demonstrating their ability to successfully confront fear. 

I, too, had suffered from shyness, lack of confidence, and fear; before coming to the South, I took pictures of all subjects except people. At first, my decision to photograph people brought nothing but hell: sweaty palms, a stuttering voice, and an intense angst upon approaching strangers for permission. But my work was transformed: the act of asking for permission, of confronting this angst, transfigured the relation between photographer and subject. By the time I asked for Mr. Fulton’s permission I transformed my cowardice into confidence by spending a year convincing strangers to pose for my photographs. 

A photograph must be about something. If it is a photograph of a person–in this case Mr. Fulton–it has the burden of specifying why attention was paid by the photographer. In a theatrical performance the playbill is unnecessary to identify the star. The individuals I photograph are stars. They are the ones who make you stare. There is no doubt this person is special. Everyone else humbly assumes their supporting roles. The measure of a portrait I make is in its ability to convince the viewer no one else matters. 

Upon my return to Natchez, Mr. Fulton and I walked to the back of his property, where he showed me his latest efforts in erosion control. As I admired these efforts, Mr. Fulton recounted the adventure of the frog and the mouse: The mischievous duo were best friends, connected by their shared burden of curiosity. One day, overcome by a sweet aroma in the air, they followed their noses and discovered a jug of fresh milk. Overcome by curiosity, they leaned too far in and fell in. The inside of the jug was slippery and steep, and they could not extricate themselves. The mouse despondently said they were doomed; the frog exhorted the mouse to keep swimming. Unconvinced, the mouse stopped paddling. He was lost. The frog, refusing to concede, kept kicking; he kicked, kicked, and kicked even more furiously. To his delight, the cream on the surface of the milk solidified, and he leaped to safety. “This is why I keep working,” said Mr. Fulton. 

Mr. Fulton’s largesse continued over my six years of visiting Natchez and traveling in the South. His perseverance set the standard by which I measured my efforts. The opportunity to photograph Mr. Fulton allowed me to reconsider my conception of the world.