Ogden Museum of Southern Art presents Baldwin Lee, a photography exhibition, will open at the Museum on October 5, 2024. Baldwin Lee will feature a selection of over 40 gelatin silver prints culled from thousands of images Lee made across the South in the 1980s, many of these photographs being exhibited for the first time. The exhibition will include compelling portraits of Black Americans, as well as a collection of landscape and cityscape images that visually encapsulate the Reagan-era American South.
Born in 1951 in Brooklyn, New York, Baldwin Lee was raised in Manhattan’s Chinatown. He studied photography at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.) with renowned American photographer Minor White, and received an MFA from Yale School of Art, where he studied with one of the 20th century’s most celebrated photographers, Walker Evans. After graduating with his MFA, Lee accepted the position of Assistant Professor of Photography at Yale University. In 1982 Lee became the first Director of the Photography Department at the University of Tennessee. The following year, Lee set out from Knoxville with a 4 x 5 view camera on a two-thousand-mile journey of self-discovery photographing his adopted homeland – the American South.
Lee’s artistic goal was to partially re-trace and re-photograph the 1930s-40s routes made across the South by his teacher and mentor Walker Evans. Unlike Evans’ iconic depression-era photographs, Lee would eventually focus on documenting Black Americans, many of whom were living in poverty on the fringes of society. Over the next seven years Lee traveled thousands of miles on the back roads of the South, making over 10,000 photographs – producing one of the most important visual documents of and about the American South in the past half century.
With this body of work, Lee had found his primary subject, and credits his many years of working within Black communities throughout the South as having a “political” effect on his life and art. The compassion Lee felt for those he photographed resonates within his work.
Although Lee’s 1980s photographs were known and respected by his fellow photographers and collectors, his work remained largely unknown and under appreciated by the larger public. This would change in 2018, when Barney Kulok, publisher of Hunter’s Point Press, stumbled upon an exhibition at Ogden Museum of Southern Art – One Place Understood: Photographs from The Do Good Fund Collection. The exhibition included 3 photographs by Baldwin Lee. Mesmerized by the power of Lee’s photographs, Kulok immediately reached out to the artist. This chance encounter culminated in the Hunter’s Point Press 2022 publication of “Baldwin Lee”, a book of the artist’s 1980s Southern photographs.
The book, “Baldwin Lee” became an instant classic and the first edition sold out in less than a month. The book was shortlisted as one of the best photo books of 2022 by “Aperture Magazine”, “TIME” and the International Center for Photography. The book’s success led to solo exhibitions at Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York City, Joseph Bellows Gallery, La Jolla, California and David Hill Gallery, London, England. A`er nearly 40 years, Baldwin Lee is finally being recognized for his groundbreaking work.
Richard McCabe, Curator of Photography, Ogden Museum of Southern Art, shares “Baldwin Lee’s photographs from the 1980s stand today as one of the most important and in-depth visual documents of the 20th century South. Lee’s clarity of vision and humanity resonates within his art and has inspired a new generation of photographers.”
Ogden Museum of Southern Art
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New Orleans, Louisiana 70130
www.ogdenmuseum.org
