The exhibition Baldwin Lee will feature a selection of over 50 gelatin silver prints culled from thousands of images Lee made across the South in the 1980s. Many of these photographs will be exhibited for the first time. The exhibition will include compelling portraits of Black Americans, as well as a collection of landscape, cityscape and still-life images that visually encapsulate the Reagan-era American South.

Baldwin Lee Lecture at the George Eastman Museum

A first-generation Chinese American, Baldwin Lee is a photographer and educator known for his photographs of Black communities in the American South. Lee received a bachelor's degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1972) where he studied photography with Minor White, and went on to receive an master's of fine arts from Yale University (1975) where he studied with Walker Evans. In 1982, he became an art professor at the University of Tennessee, where he founded the university's photography program. He then decided to take a tour of the deep south, covering 2,000 miles over the course of ten days. During this trip, Lee widely photographed the people, landscapes, and cities of the south. In his work, Lee strived to represent his subjects as individuals with vibrant personalities, rather than reducing them to stereotypes or emphasizing their poverty. Lee’s work is in the collections of George Eastman Museum. Hear about Lee's journey and artistic process as a photographer and educator during his talk.

Baldwin Lee’s Southern Journeys

In the 1980s, the photographer took a two-thousand-mile road trip through the American South, making portraits that glow with beauty and trust.