In the 1980s an unknown photographer from New York travelled through the US capturing life in black communities. Now these mostly unseen pictures have made him a star
At 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 the New Yorker to 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 David Hill Gallery, London. Comprising a mere fraction of the estimated 10,000 photographs that Lee, the New York-born son of a Hong Kong emigrant, made on various extended road trips around Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, Tennessee and Louisiana between 1982 and 1989, they are nevertheless a revelatory record of a time and a place and a people.
His subjects are the black Americans he encountered in the mainly rural, often desperately deprived, southern communities where segregation still cast a long shadow. Many of them had never spoken to an Asian person before.
