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.