Go see Baldwin Lee’s everyday people from the Black Belt (at the Greenberg Gallery in NYC through November 22). You’ll feel their nappy edges and big brown eyes, their limbs and skins they’re in…
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Not that Baldwin Lee is an exoticizer — his subjects tend to hold their own gaze. They take in the photographer as much as he takes them in.
The Chinese-American man with the camera may concentrate his subjects’ attention for a moment but life is going on. I love this next timeless image of grown folks whose bliss is set against the plastic engraving of a fancy olde couple on the wall. Yet their roundelay isn’t just a tease. Nor is it for our eyes only. This kiss is realer than Rodin’s…
Tactile values!? Yup! I’m just realizing how often Lee’s photos are handsy, pointing toward lives of manual labor that defined the dailiness of so many of his adult subjects.
Another line comes to mind — attributed by “Afro-Mississippian” writer C. Liegh McInnis to his dad (who mused after seeing baby Liegh for the first time): “He looks like everybody I love.”
Vince Aletti provides a quick and clean summation of Baldwin Lee’s story in a recent review of Lee’s new photo book…
Baldwin Lee, a Chinese-American photographer from New York, was in his thirties when he traveled through the South and made the 88 extraordinary pictures in his self-titled book (Hunters Point Press); they were culled, a note informs us, from an archive of more than ten thousand images. (Stop a minute to consider the achievement of the editor, photographer Barney Kulok, as sensitive as he is shrewd.) Lee had studied at MIT with Minor White and at Yale with Walker Evans (whose late-life teaching style he describes as “indifferent at best”). For a year, he also worked as Evans’s printer. Both photographers left an impression, Evans’s the most obvious, if only because Lee’s focus was also poverty in the rural South. In an interview here, Lee insists the work he made “would never have come about without adequate education and awareness: North/South, Black/white…poor/rich, powerful/subjugated, privileged/deprived, entitled/abandoned, hopeful/hopeless.” But Lee’s education would have been meaningless if he hadn’t been able to approach his subjects person to person and eye to eye. The warmth and soulfulness of his work is not the result of intellectual effort; it’s grounded in understanding, a combination of intensity and restraint, and, surely, a shared sense of otherness. Lee worked, in the classic manner, with a 4×5-in. view camera on a tripod and staged his photographs carefully, but he describes them as “flawed theater. No matter what I say, people do something else, and this is where it gets fantastically interesting” – an understatement where these pictures are concerned.
Sadly, Lee no longer takes photographs; he doesn’t even own a camera. He finds it difficult to engage with the world with any confidence, he says, and “I can no longer reconcile the difference between the lives lived by the people I photographed with the life I lived.”
This photo (taken at the Parthenon in Nashville) punctuates Lee’s last word…
