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Baldwin Lee

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I was a child of the 1960s, who was conscious of unfairness and justice, but the first trip I made to the south in 1983 awakened my politics. 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. I suspect that few are aware of the accomplishments of Baldwin Lee, who, photographing in the South 30 years ago, produced a body of work that is among the most remarkable in American photography of the past half-century. For seven years in the 1980s, Chinese-American New York photographer Baldwin Lee cut an eccentric figure around the Southern states of the USA. Following his time with Minor White, Lee matriculated to Yale, where he studied with Walker Evans and printed for the master.

But during this trip I recognized that my greatest engagement was when I was in the presence of Black Americans. As described in several revealing comments to Brown, Lee’s photographs often involved interaction and arrangement. The purpose of my initial trip through the South was to explore possibilities; I wanted to see what the South looked like. You don’t achieve anything without clawing over someone else’s back,” he told Magic Hour podcast recently. Arriving almost four decades after Lee began his journey, this publication reveals the artist's unique commitment to picturing life in America.

Lee was born in 1951 and grew up “totally sheltered” in Chinatown with his parents and four siblings. Family members were often the unwitting participants in indecipherable events that left us with many more questions than answers. Peculiar encounters, curious radio transmissions, and unexplained coincidences became the norms of my childhood. Very few photographers have wrangled together straight scenes, choreography, and chance so successfully.

In John Szarkowski’s terms, Minor White exemplified the “mirror” based outlook concerned with self-expression, Evans the “windows” style using photography to examine the outer world. A new book—the first-ever collection of [Baldwin] 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. A lover of gesture and light (particularly light falling on skin) and of light’s rendering in a black-and-white silver print, Baldwin stopped photographing in the early ’90s when he felt he had said all he could say in photography. Throughout the years the city and the surrounding territories have experienced their share of socio-economic struggles and topographic transformations that have altered its identity.A couple had just lost their baby because they didn’t have a crib, and the sleeping baby had gotten caught in the sheets. The Need to Know, a photo book, is my exploration of the meager details that emerged from brief and cryptic conversations with my father and my curiosity about Cold War espionage and its impact upon my family at the time. The Scourged Back , meanwhile, depicts Gordon, a formerly enslaved man with grotesque scars on his back from repeated whippings.

For those in New York, thirty silver gelatin prints can be seen at through November 12th at Howard Greenberg Gallery (link here), which describes the show as “ an intimate portrayal of daily life in the American South that is considered to be among the most remarkable in the last half century. And it has to do with how somebody’s outward demeanour can convey something about their identity or condition. Eschewing the socially concerned ethos that often underpinned the visual documentation of race and poverty in America at that time, Lee’s calm, measured portraits speak of a deeper engagement with his subjects.BOB DYLAN: MIXING UP THE MEDICINE is an unprecedented glimpse into the creative life of one of America’s most groundbreaking, influential and enduring artists. Lee gave his subjects stage direction, but there could be no orchestration of the world around them. Réhahn discusses his groundbreaking new photographic series ''Memories of Impressionism,'' his artistic journey during and after Covid, and how modernity can draw inspiration from the past.

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