‘It stunned me that people had to live like this’: Baldwin Lee on his rediscovered images of the deep south
t 72, and almost 30 years after he gave up photography, Baldwin Lee is having a long overdue moment. Following the publication of an eponymously titled monograph last year, which led theto call him “one of the great overlooked luminaries of American picture-making”, a selection of his evocative images of black life in the American south is currently on show for the first time in Britain, at the.
The results, shot in monochrome, are intimate and compelling in their depiction of the ordinary lives of black Americans born into, and confined by, the kind of poverty that, as Lee points out, had remained “almost unchanged since emancipation”. Eschewing the socially concerned ethos that often underpinned the visual documentation of race and poverty in America at that time, Lee’s calm, measured portraits speak of a deeper engagement with his subjects.
“Minor was a total eccentric, who didn’t hesitate to share his experiences of taking peyote and other psychedelic substances. I was this babe in the woods and the whole experience just blindsided me.”More importantly perhaps, White’s radical ideas about photography – he was a pioneer of abstraction in his own work – were liberating to Lee, who suddenly found the perfect outlet for his own hitherto suppressed creativity.
What was Evans like to work for? “Oh, he was an exemplary member of the American aristocracy, a dandy who loved to wear expensive English clothes. He enjoyed having company and was very sweet to me. He would often knock on the darkroom door and present me with an ice-cream sundae.” Evans died in April 1975, the year Lee graduated from Yale. White died in June 1976, the same month in which Imogen Cunningham, a pioneer of modernist photography, also died.
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