“There was this man who was pale, very, very pale, and he had a shock of uncombed white hair, and walked into the room barefoot. “It was the worst,” Lee recalled, adding, “I was just despondent, until I took my first class with Minor White.” Lee recounts his first encounter with the photographer, in his sophomore year, as some people might narrate their run-in with an ambassador from another planet.
Then he showed up in Cambridge and promptly hit a wall. He graduated as class valedictorian from Brooklyn Tech, with an M.I.T. Academically gifted and singularly focussed, Lee made good. From childhood, Lee was given the impression that he had but one goal: to attend the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which would lead him, his father hoped, to a practical, respectable, high-paying job. Chinatown at the time was an insular, conservative environment, which Lee described as “essentially a small-town upbringing.” He recalls that, of the six hundred students in his elementary and middle schools, only two were non-Chinese. Army on D Day, and had his aspirations to become an architect dashed when he inherited his uncle’s thriving business supplying noodles to Chinese restaurants up and down the East Coast. Born and raised in New York, he was the eldest son of a reluctant Chinatown “noodle king,” who had emigrated from Hong Kong, fought in the U.S. Lee was never meant to be a photographer. But a new book from Hunters Point Press-the first-ever collection of Lee’s work-and a solo exhibition at New York’s Howard Greenberg Gallery make the case that he is one of the great overlooked luminaries of American picture-making. “I showed enough to get tenure and raises,” he told me recently, from his home near the University of Tennessee, where he has been teaching for four decades.
#I never read i just look at pictures archive#
Selections from his archive of nearly ten thousand pictures, taken in poor Black communities in the American South between 19, have been exhibited sporadically. But the work of Baldwin Lee, a graduate of M.I.T., where he studied with Minor White, and of Yale, where he studied with Walker Evans, has been hiding in plain sight. When this happens, the images in question are often the work of a self-taught master, such as the compendious Arkansas portraitist Mike Disfarmer or the Chicago nanny and eagle-eyed street photographer Vivian Maier, both of whose œuvres had been left to molder until they were rescued by keen connoisseurs.
It’s not often that a body of photography is hoisted up from obscurity and straight into the canon.
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