Ogden Museum of Southern Art present Baldwin Leea photography exhibition which will open at the museum on October 5, 2024. Baldwin Lee will feature a selection of more than 40 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 grew up in Manhattan’s Chinatown. He studied photography at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) with renowned American photographer Minor White and earned an MFA from the Yale School of Art, where he studied with one of the world’s most famous photographers. 20th century, Walker Evans. After receiving his MFA, Lee accepted the position of assistant professor of photography at Yale University. In 1982, Lee became the first chair of the photography department at the University of Tennessee. The following year, Lee set out from Knoxville with a 4×5 camera on a two-thousand-mile journey of self-discovery, photographing his adopted homeland – the American South.
Lee’s artistic goal was to retrace and partially rephotograph the 1930s-40s routes traveled across the South by his teacher and mentor Walker Evans. Unlike Evans’ iconic depression-era photographs, Lee would ultimately focus on documenting black Americans, many of whom lived in poverty and on the margins of society. Over the next seven years, Lee traveled thousands of miles on the backroads of the South, making more than 10,000 photographs, producing one of the most important visual documents on and about the American South in recent times. half century.
With this work, Lee had found his primary subject and credits his many years of work within black communities in the South as having had a “political” effect on his life and art. The compassion Lee felt for those he photographed resonates in his work.
Although Lee’s photographs from the 1980s were known and respected by his fellow photographers and collectors, his work remained largely unknown and underappreciated by the general public. That would change in 2018, when Barney Kulok, publisher of Hunter’s Point Press, stumbled upon an exhibition at the 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 contacted the artist. This chance encounter culminated in Hunter’s Point Press’s 2022 publication of “Baldwin Lee,” a book of the artist’s Southern photographs from the 1980s.
The book « Baldwin Lee » became an instant classic and the first edition sold out in less than a month. The book was selected among the best photo books of 2022 by « Aperture Magazine », « TIME » and the International Center of Photography. The success of the book led to solo exhibitions at the Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York, the Joseph Bellows Gallery in La Jolla, California, and the David Hill Gallery in London, England. After nearly 40 years, Baldwin Lee is finally being recognized for his groundbreaking work.
Richard McCabe, curator of photography at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, shares: “Baldwin Lee’s photographs from the 1980s constitute today one of the most important and in-depth visual documents of the 20th century South. Lee’s clarity of vision and humanity resonate in his art and have inspired a new generation of photographers.”
Ogden Museum of Southern Art
925 Camp Street
New Orleans, Louisiana 70130
www.ogdenmuseum.org
