Lula, Mississippi - Woman in Hat, 1984
When Baldwin Lee first arrived in the south, he did not know what he would photograph. He took a 2,000-mile exploratory trip on the back roads photographing anything that interested him with his 4 x 5-inch view camera. "My subjects included landscapes, cityscapes, close-up details, night studies, interiors of commercial and residential buildings, and portraits of people—white and black, old and young, rural and urban, well-to-do and poor," he writes in a manuscript that has yet to find a publisher. "Upon proofing the film, I saw that the suspicion I had had while making the photographs was confirmed—what interested me most were the pictures of black Americans who lived in poverty.” Lee was surprised by the strong empathy he found he had for the subject.