Baldwin Lee: New York (1975–1979)
Howard Greenberg Gallery presents Baldwin Lee: New York (1975–1979), an exhibition of large scale black and white photographs made during a formative period in the artist’s career. Created between 1975 and 1979, these photographs are being exhibited for the first time.
Raised in New York’s Chinatown, Baldwin Lee studied photography with Minor White at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before continuing his education at Yale University, where he worked with Walker Evans and received his MFA in 1975.
In the years that followed, Lee repeatedly returned to New York with his 4 × 5 view camera. He often photographed in the early morning and during the winter months, when the streets were quieter and the city seemed temporarily emptied of its usual activity.
Rather than treating Manhattan as a collection of architectural subjects, Lee was interested in the traces of people within the urban landscape. Human figures are rarely visible in these photographs, but their presence can be felt throughout. Worn streets and building facades, shop windows, parked cars and ordinary details reveal a city shaped by those who live and move through it.
The photographs capture a quieter and less familiar New York, suspended between stillness and everyday life. They also anticipate Lee’s enduring interest in people, place and the ways in which photography can reveal the social character of a landscape.
About the Author
Baldwin Lee was born in Brooklyn in 1951 and grew up in New York’s Chinatown. He studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with Minor White and later at Yale University with Walker Evans, receiving his MFA in photography in 1975.
In 1983, while living in Knoxville, Tennessee, Lee began a series of extended journeys through the American South with his 4 × 5 view camera. Over the following seven years, he photographed Black communities across the region, portraying people at home, at work, in the streets and during moments of leisure. For Lee, a first generation Chinese American, the project became both an exploration of American society and a deeply personal encounter with questions of race, identity and belonging. The resulting archive contains nearly ten thousand black and white negatives and is now considered the central body of work of his career. Decades later, this largely unseen archive gained wider recognition with the publication of the monograph Baldwin Lee. Edited by photographer Barney Kulok, the book brings together eighty eight photographs alongside a conversation between Lee and curator Jessica Bell Brown and an essay by writer Casey Gerald. The publication introduced a broader audience to a remarkable body of work that offers an intimate and complex portrait of life in the American South during the 1980s.
Baldwin Lee: New York (1975–1979)
17 September to 31 October 2026
Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York
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