Baldwin Lee

Baldwin Lee, published by Hunters Point Press in 2022, is the first monograph of a body of work Lee made across the American South in the 1980s. It gathers 88 black-and-white photographs from that project.

Between 1983 and 1989, Lee drove through Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana on repeated trips from his teaching post in Tennessee, photographing Black families and neighbors in yards, homes, and streets. The project produced nearly 10,000 negatives, from which editor Barney Kulok selected the 88 images in this book. Jessica Bell Brown interviews Lee, and Casey Gerald contributes an essay. Together they frame the pictures within American documentary photography and within the specific circumstances, personal and racial, under which a Chinese American photographer came to make this work in the South.

Lee (b. 1951) studied under Walker Evans and Minor White at Yale before joining the faculty of the University of Tennessee, where he taught photography for over four decades. The work went largely unpublished and unexhibited for decades. This monograph has since brought gallery shows and renewed critical attention to it as a major, long-overlooked document of the South. This is a different photographer from H. Lee, whose Grassland (Kehrer Verlag) is also in this collection.