Le sujet de ses photos étaient les Américains noirs : à la maison, au travail, et aux loisirs, dans la rue, et parmi la nature.
Ce projet accapara Baldwin Lee, un Chinois américain de première génération, pour le reste de cette décennie, et transformerait à jamais sa perception de son pays, de ses habitants et de lui-même.
Les archives issues de cette période de sept ans contiennent près de dix mille négatifs en noir et blanc.
Cette monographie, “Baldwin Lee”, présente une sélection de quatre vingt huit images sélectionnées par le photographe Barney Kulok, accompagnée d’une entrevue avec Brandon Lee par la commissaire Jessica Bell Brown et d’un essai de l’écrivain Casey Gerald.
Arrivée près de quatre décennies après que Lee a commencé son voyage, cette publication révèle l’engagement unique de l’artiste à imaginer la vie en Amérique et, à son tour, l’un des corps de travail les plus perçants et poignants de son temps ; entrevue par Jessica Bell Brown, essai par Casey Gerald, sous la direction de Barney Kulok.
“Baldwin Lee’s book is one of the best I’ve seen in a very long time. The pictures stand apart, not because they are depictions of Black subjects by a first-generation Chinese-American, but because they were made by a photographer of rare perception and instinct.” – Joshua Chuang, Curator
“… Walker Evans was one of Lee’s teachers. Like Evans, Lee has a sensitive eye for both poverty and dignity. But Lee’s southern exposure wasn’t overwhelmingly white, as it was in Evans’s classic “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.” Quite the contrary, Lee is a witness to those at the bottom of U.S. stratification, and their refusal to swallow that status. …The work is political, because it exposes the violence of poverty inherited from the plantation-economy past. But it is most of all attentiveness to the composure of his subjects that is echoed masterfully in the composition of his shots. …We are a motley assortment of people in the United States. Our relations are not tidy, not in their beauty, nor in their disastrous disaffection and cruelty. ” – Imani Perry, The Atlantic
“Must-See Photography Books of 2022: The first collection of remarkable work, made in the 1980s in the American South, by a Chinese-American photographer who, under the influence of Walker Evans, saw his Black subjects with an inherently incisive and compassionate eye.”- Vince Aletti, Photograph Magazine
The subject of his pictures were Black Americans: at home, at work, and at play, in the street, and among nature. This project would consume Lee—a first-generation Chinese American—for the remainder of that decade, and it would forever transform his perception of his country, its people, and himself. The resulting archive from this seven-year period contains nearly ten thousand black-and-white negatives. This monograph, *Baldwin Lee*, presents a selection of eighty-eight images edited by the photographer Barney Kulok, accompanied by an interview with Lee by the curator Jessica Bell Brown and an essay by the writer Casey Gerald. Arriving almost four decades after Lee began his journey, this publication reveals the artist’s unique commitment to picturing life in America and, in turn, one of the most piercing and poignant bodies of work of its time ; interview by Jessica Bell Brown, essay by Casey Gerald, edited by Barney Kulok.
