Baldwin Lee with Imani Perry

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"I suspect that few are aware of the accomplishments of Baldwin Lee, who, photographing in the South 30 years ago, produced a body of work that is among the most remarkable in American photography of the past half century." —Mark Steinmetz, Time Magazine

In 1983, Baldwin Lee (b. 1951) left his home in Knoxville, Tennessee, with his 4 × 5 view camera and set out on the first of a series of road trips to photograph the American South. The subject of his pictures were Black Americans: at home, at work, and at play, in the street, and among nature. This project would consume Lee—a first-generation Chinese American—for the remainder of that decade, and it would forever transform his perception of his country, its people, and himself. The resulting archive from this seven-year period contains nearly ten thousand black-and-white negatives. This monograph presents a selection of eighty-eight images edited by the photographer Barney Kulok, accompanied by an interview with Lee by the curator Jessica Bell Brown and an essay by the writer Casey Gerald. Arriving almost four decades after Lee began his journey, this publication reveals the artist’s unique commitment to picturing life in America and, in turn, one of the most piercing and poignant bodies of work of its time.

Baldwin Lee studied photography with Minor White at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, receiving a Bachelor of Science degree in 1972. Lee then continued his education at Yale University, where he studied with Walker Evans. He received a Master of Fine Arts in 1975. After school, Lee began teaching photography at the Massachusetts College of Art and then at Yale, while creating his own photographs, which at the time were rooted in the exploration of the contemporary built environment. Lee's later work from the early to mid-1980s entitled, Black Americans in the South is a compelling and empathic portrait that represents its subjects within their rural environments, expressing the joys of childhood, the gravity of adult life, and the places in between. This work was featured in Aperture Magazine, Issue 115, New Southern Photography: Between Myth and Reality.

Lee's work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Chrysler Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia. His photographs are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the University of Michigan Museum of Art, the University of Kentucky Art Museum, the Yale University Art Gallery, and the Museum of the City of New York. He has been honored with fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation (1984) and the National Endowment for the Arts (1984 and 1990).

Imani Perry is the Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University. She is the author of seven books, most recently the New York Times bestselling South to America: A Journey Below the Mason Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation (Ecco, 2022.) Prior books include the multiple award-winning titles: Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry (Beacon 2018), and May We Forever Stand: A History of the Black National Anthem (UNC Press, 2018.) She is also the author of the critically acclaimed: Breathe: A Letter to My Sons (Beacon 2019.) Perry writes a newsletter for the Atlantic, and has also written for other publications including the New York Times, Oxford American, Harpers, New York Magazine, and The Smithsonian Magazine. Perry’s work is based in the study of history, literature, culture, and the arts, and driven by her origins as a daughter of Birmingham, Alabama and a child raised by organizers, activists and intellectuals in the 20th century freedom movement.