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Baldwin Lee

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Baldwin Lee (born 1951)[1] is a Chinese-American photographer and educator known for his photographs of African-American communities in the Southern United States. He has had solo exhibitions at the Chrysler Museum of Art[2] and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia,[3] and received a Guggenheim Fellowship.[4] His work is held in many private and public collections including the Museum of Modern Art in New York,[5] Yale University Art Gallery,[6] and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.[7]

Biography

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Lee was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1951.[1] He received a BS from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1972) where he studied photography with Minor White, and went on to receive an MFA from Yale University (1975) where he studied with Walker Evans.[8]

I knew that I wanted to do more work about race and poverty. This marked the first time that the content of my photographs superseded my concern for the formal structure of the rectangle.
— Baldwin Lee, [2]

In 1982, he became an art professor at the University of Tennessee, where he founded the university's photography program.[9] He then decided to take a tour of the Deep South, covering 2,000 miles over the course of ten days.[10] During this trip, Lee widely photographed the people, landscapes, and cities of the South.[11] After developing his photos, he realized that he had a particular passion for the African-American communities he had interacted with. He took a longer tour of the southern United States from 1983 to 1989, producing roughly 10,000 photographs.[12][13]

The majority of this work focused on the lives of low-income African-Americans.[12] When Lee arrived in a new town, he would visit the police station and let them know that he was planning to take photos with expensive photography equipment, so they could warn him about the poorer, redlined parts of town. Lee would then make a point of visiting these neighborhoods, since they had the highest concentration of Black residents.[2]

In his work, Lee strived to represent his subjects as individuals with vibrant personalities, rather than reducing them to stereotypes or emphasizing their poverty.[9]

Lee retired from teaching in 2014,[13] and is currently professor emeritus at University of Tennessee.[14] He authored the monograph Baldwin Lee (2022), edited by Barney Kulok, which was short-listed for the Aperture/Paris-Photo Book of The Year Award in 2022.[15]

Recognition

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Lee has received recognition for his contributions to American photography. The New Yorker Magazine called him "one of the great overlooked luminaries of American picture-making." Imani Perry wrote that "Lee has a sensitive eye for both poverty and dignity", describing him as "a witness to those at the bottom of U.S. stratification, and their refusal to swallow that status".[16] In a 2015 essay in Time, photographer Mark Steinmetz wrote that Lee "produced a body of work that is among the most remarkable in American photography of the past half century".[13]

Awards

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Exhibitions

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Solo exhibitions

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Group exhibitions

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Collections

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Lee's work is held in the following permanent collections:[19][better source needed]

References

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  1. ^ a b "Children and Childhood". University of Michigan.
  2. ^ a b c d "Baldwin Lee: The South in Black and White". Chrysler Museum of Art. Retrieved July 8, 2022.
  3. ^ a b "Land Inhabited and Works of Baldwin Lee -The Do Good Fund". Museum of Contemporary Art Georgia. MOCA GA.
  4. ^ a b "Guggenheim Fellow Baldwin Lee". John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
  5. ^ a b "Baldwin S. Lee". The Museum of Modern Art. Retrieved July 8, 2022.
  6. ^ a b "Baldwin Lee in the Yale University Art Gallery Collection". Yale University Art Gallery. Yale University.
  7. ^ "Baldwin Lee".
  8. ^ "Baldwin Lee by Walker Evans". Metropolitan Museum of Art (NY).
  9. ^ a b "Baldwin Lee's unblinking views of the South". The Virginian-Pilot. June 26, 2012. Retrieved July 8, 2022.
  10. ^ Sisley, Dominique (June 29, 2020). "A powerful portrait of Black American life in the South". Huck. Retrieved July 8, 2022.
  11. ^ "Baldwin Lee photographs to exhibit at the Tennessee Arts Commission Gallery". Tennessee Arts Commission. July 28, 2015. Retrieved July 8, 2022.
  12. ^ a b Gerald, Casey (October 13, 2021). "Baldwin Lee's Southern Journals". Aperture. Aperture Foundation.
  13. ^ a b c Steinmetz, Mark (February 25, 2015). "Photographing Black Lives in America's South". Lightbox. Time.
  14. ^ "Baldwin Lee at UTK". University of Tennessee Knoxville.
  15. ^ "Baldwin Lee". Hunters Point Press.
  16. ^ Perry, Imani (June 10, 2022). "Lessons From Black and Chinese Relations in the Deep South". The Atlantic.
  17. ^ "Photography: Recent Acquisitions on MOMA Exhibition Spelunker". www.moma.org.
  18. ^ BigWheel. "Vision, Language, and Influence: Photographs of the South". Knoxville Museum of Art. Retrieved July 8, 2022.
  19. ^ "Artist Talk: Baldwin Lee". MOCA GA. Retrieved July 8, 2022.
  20. ^ "Exhibit | Land Inhabited and the Work of Baldwin Lee". Mandatory. November 5, 2016. Retrieved July 8, 2022.
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