BALDWIN LEE: LIFE BEYOND THE FRAME

Lee’s photographs of the American South made in the 1980s are the work of an acknowledged master of the medium. These pictures, produced many years ago, have been recognized for both their artistic excellence and significant documentation of neglected communities.

His eponymous 2022 book was shortlisted for the Aperture-Paris Photo book of the year, and Lee’s work has been exhibited at the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia in 2012, and Atlanta’s Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia in 2016. He is represented on both coasts and in London, and his work resides in numerous prestigious collections. A 50-print exhibition was on view at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans, October, 2024–February, 2025. (All the images in the show, some of which are seen here, can be viewed online at ogdenmuseum.org.)

While the narrative content of Lee’s pictures takes precedence over his formal strategies, his work demonstrates an innate sense of design and composition that cannot be taught. A first-generation Chinese-American in a family traced back 26 generations, Lee was raised in New York’s Chinatown. He had set out to become a doctor, ostensibly to please his father, but a photography class at MIT taught by Minor White altered his career aspirations, and an MFA earned at the vaunted Yale graduate program in Photography under Walker Evans intensified his commitment to the medium.

“Minor White was the first artist and first gay man I’d ever met,” said Lee, in a phone interview last October. “He taught me that photography could be a creative means of expression…Evans demonstrated something I had yet to learn about class and social structure. He was an aristocrat of fine breeding, though a rather disinterested teacher.

“He didn’t critique your pictures or suggest how to improve them. He talked about subjects in the world we’d be entering. He taught by example—by his behavior and demeanor—and the way he conducted himself. Extremely valuable life lessons to which you can’t really attach a price tag.”

A teaching position at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville sent Lee to the American South for the first time in 1982, and he spent his free time for eight years exploring the region and documenting what he saw in underserved and under-represented Black communities. Those years of work with his large-format camera mounted on a tripod—even in Evans’ signature territory—resulted in a body of distinctive, insightful reportage, revealing Lee’s sensitive eye and ability to record moments, both poetic and prosaic, in the lives of his subjects. After an early trip south, he said, “I knew that I wanted to do more work about race and poverty. This marked the first time that the content of my photographs superseded my concern for the formal structure of the rectangle.”

That’s exactly what distinguishes “art” from “documentary” photographs. Documentary used to mean “objective,” “true” and “factual;” all those were assumed—though they are no longer. Art photographs now often borrow the straightforward appearance and styles of documentary images to benefit from the gravitas they convey. Once a photographer as skilled as Lee understood the structure of the frame, perhaps there was no longer a need to dwell on it—because light, composition, design and other aesthetic considerations had become almost automatic for him. “I never formally learned the principles of composition,” says Lee, “but things should be arranged in a certain way.”

If we were tell AI to create a Baldwin Lee photograph, it may spit out a black-and-white image depicting Black children in a rural Southern environ. What it will lack is what Walker Evans called “lyric documentary,” a visual balance between cultural commentary and the aesthetic elements within the frame. Lee’s precise and very beautiful compositions achieve this Evans-like balance and provide intimate glimpses into a world that, “in the 1980s,” says Lee, “had changed very little from the one Evans had photographed in the 1930s.”

From 1983 to 1989, Lee made 10,000 photographs in this expansive series. At times he retraced Evans’ steps, identifying specific locales in which Evans had photographed. As he traveled through the deep South, Lee says that he photographed “everything he found interesting; people black and white, both rich and poor, landscapes, architecture…”

Remarkably, he has vivid recall of the circumstances in which he made the pictures in this portfolio, so many years ago. For portrait subjects, he says he looked for “star quality that called for attention.” His impeccable eye selected subjects whose stories could be told through gesture. “Hands, carriage and posture help define character at a glance,” says Lee. Once people agreed to be photographed, Lee directed their body positions and gestures, although he says that—invariably—they “did something different, and usually more interesting.”

In Vicksburg, Mississippi, 1984, three young boys sit at the railroad tracks that run through their front yards, causing their houses to shake. Lee shows us a rural environ with row housing, a neatly arranged clothes line, adults on front porches and steps, in addition to the three friends hanging out. Perfect light and a palpable stillness permeate this photograph, and, as full of content as this image is, there is more to its story.

In what Lee calls a literal, graphic example of “the other side of the tracks,” he describes the scene directly behind and outside the frame: “Facing the tracks there was house on a hill with a grand, beautiful porch, full of flowers,” he says. “The woman who lived there thought her view was spoiled by the scene I photographed. So, she had her house literally lifted off the ground and rotated 90 degrees so that she wouldn’t have to see it…” Both a confluence and opposition of lines converge in this powerful blend of composition and narrative content.

In Columbia, South Carolina, 1984, Lee carefully constructed a vertical photograph, with fore, middle and backgrounds clearly defined, as well as a glimpse of a neighborhood street. An older, taller girl, up front, appears shy, her hands clasped anxiously, self-protectively, while the younger shields her eyes from the sun, perhaps impatient to get back to roller skating.

The contrast between slick advertising and misspelled words in vernacular street signage caught Lee’s eye in Vicksburg, Mississippi, 1984, resulting in a shrewdly observed image that surely would have pleased Walker Evans. The man in Valdosta, Georgia, 1984, wearing a necktie and holstered gun, looks intently into Lee’s lens, his right-hand signaling others to ‘stay back.’ Lee recalls that, “The street he lived on had a ‘shotgun shack’ in which illegal drugs were being trafficked, attracting many misfits and delinquents, and the gun was for his self-protection. The police, he said, were not doing their jobs.”

The monolithic Greek revival building dwarfs four hand-holding siblings in Nashville, Tennesee, 1983, in an image that almost looks like two different pictures. Walking at dusk, Lee noticed “the beautiful light as the sun dipped below the horizon…I met a family of six on the sidewalk and asked the parents if I could make a photograph of the children. They are lit by an old-style flash bulb that allows only one exposure per bulb.”

A five-year-old girl stands with her hand on a television set made in the 1950s, in Charleston, South Carolina, 1983. The totem of electronics is topped by an image of Pop idol Diana Ross. “I unexpectedly met this girl and her mother walking on the street, and was graciously invited into their home. The young lady was especially clever, smart and really beautiful,” says Lee.

A bare-chested young boy strikes a defiant, militant pose before a pile of burning leaves in Mobile, Alabama, 1984. A group of curious on-lookers occupy Lee’s middle ground in this strong environmental portrait.

In Natchez, Mississippi, 1984, a lady of the night is seen in bright daylight, sun on her face and blouse, a slight breeze blowing her skirt. If Lee hadn’t told us otherwise, we may have thought she was walking home from church or school. Lee recalls that the woman was dressed very differently when he’d met her the previous day. Even at small scale in reproduction, her presence exudes confidence, physical strength and a rebellious attitude.

Shooting from behind the man leaning on a telephone pole in his “Sunday Best,” Lee avoided the clichéd image of “Alienation” or “Loneliness,” in Vicksburg, Mississippi, 1984.

“After eight years, I felt my best work was behind me,” says Lee. “I had done all that I could do. I was running out of ideas and didn’t want to repeat myself.” Founding Chair of the University of Tennesee’s Photography program, Lee says, “I enjoyed working with the students and helping to prepare them, psychologically and emotionally, for the world in which they’d be working. Photographers must derive their imagery from the world outside,” he says, “and the courage to engage with people must be cultivated.”

Does he agree with Evans that photography can’t really be taught? “You can teach photography,” Lee says, “but you can’t teach someone to become a photographer.” Have any of his students found success in photography? Lee responds in his characteristically modest and philosophical way: “That depends on how one defines success…” Here’s one definition, by photographer Mark Steinmetz: in a 2015 essay in Time, he wrote that Lee, “produced a body of work that is among the most remarkable in American photography of the past half century.”

Of his calm demeanor, Lee says, “I’ve always been pretty rational and logical. I become emotional at times, but usually cruise along at a steady speed. Many things govern who I am and what I think, based on generations of predecessors.”

Lee and his wife continue to reside in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. They have two adult children—a son that is a judge, and a daughter, a doctor that works with disabled children. Lee currently channels his self-expression into creative writing, with a special interest in biography.

Addendum

Our thanks to Baldwin Lee for his time, cooperation and sincerity. Learn more about the remarkable artist and the body of work presented here at baldwinlee.com and instagram.com/baldwinlee1951. His photographs have continued to be exhibited, including a 2024 show at the Eastman Museum, Rochester, New York. His work is also included in numerous collections, including George Eastman House, Mississippi Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, National Gallery of Art and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art.