As a new exhibition of his work opens in New York, Baldwin Lee talks about capturing Black American life across the South in the 1980s – and why he eventually put the camera down
. And much like Evans’s photographs, Lee’s are precise, with an eye for contrast and symmetry , and characterised by a profound sense of balance, clarity, and control. As with Evans’s seminal, they feel like vital records, relics of not just particular moments in time but history itself, history mapped out on the faces and bodies of people –The trip, Lee tells me, “put everything into really sharp focus. It was no longer conceptual or ideological.
. There [would] be a subtle dropping of the head and the glance would always be downwards. There was this kind of obsequiousness, which was triggered because I wasn’t Black. It put into real sharp focus what the history of enslavement and subjugation had wreaked on an entire population. It just really hit me straight in the gut.”Lee’s process was deeply collaborative. He used a 4 x 5 viewfinder camera that had to be mounted on a tripod.
For a time, Lee kept photographing. He took more trips and grew “fearless”. “I would approach anybody, anywhere, anytime, anyplace. Day or night, I would knock on doors.” The material seemed endless. “It had this draw to it. I was drawing buckets of water from a well that would never run dry. I just could not exhaust the subject.”Eventually, Lee stopped taking photos entirely.
he quit is that he could “no longer reconcile the difference between the lives lived by the people I photographed with the life I lived.” There is merit in putting down the camera, of knowing when it’s time to leave; there are other ways of seeing, ones that evade capture.An accompanying monograph,
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