Published four decades after the images were made, Lee’s latest photobook shines an honest light on the hardships endured by many, which still prevail today
The notion of justice takes many forms: a verdict, a vendetta, a comeuppance. It can also look like a spotlight shone on an injustice that has long been minimised or denied. With his new self-titled monograph, Baldwin Lee joins a tradition of photographers who have delivered justice with their cameras for penurious Black people in the southern United States. During several road trips between 1983 and 1989, Lee documented African Americans living, playing, loving and surviving, often amid the grinding poverty one might associate with an impoverished nation or another era – anywhere but America, one of the wealthiest nations on the planet.
Baldwin Lee, published by Hunters Point Press, is a collection of 88 black-and-white photographs, mainly portraits. It is a mesmerising study of characters and their conditions, the foremost of which is Lee himself. Indeed, the photographer, a first-generation Chinese American raised in New York, seems an unlikely author of this acutely intuitive depiction of Black southern life given his lack of intimate connection to its cultural, racial and social realities.
Lee was born in 1951 and grew up “totally sheltered” in Chinatown with his parents and four siblings. “I went to a public school that only had two non- Chinese students, even though this was New York,” Lee says, speaking from his home in Nashville, Tennessee. “Chinatown was my exclusive world, and it wasn’t until I went to college that I realised there’s other stuff going on here.” That ’other stuff’ was the profound inequality in America, which he first confronted at Yale University, where he pursued a Master of Fine Arts in 1973 under Walker Evans. Yale introduced Lee to white people and white privilege. He had never seen such excessive amounts of status, money and access. It made him contemplate why certain groups enjoyed such wealth and power while others did not.
“One thing that has been with me since I can remember is a sense of fairness and justice. So that, coupled with learning about the larger political, social and cultural world, primed me to combine my interest in photography, my interest in larger cultural and social issues, and my interest in political issues. I had found my subject. I knew for the first time that I was going to use the preparation of my life for a purpose. I was thrilled. I felt empowered.”