Jim Hyatt welcomes the rediscovery of Baldwin Lee’s photography of Black America and Southern US poverty

Showing at the David Hill Gallery on Notting Hill’s Ladbroke Grove is a small but powerful exhibition of photographs from the 1980s of black Americans living in isolated rural communities. The photographer was Baldwin Lee, a young Chinese American who set out on a road trip across the American South in 1983: ‘I had no agenda, no plan. I took pictures of everything: landscapes, architecture, closeups, still-lifes, pictures at night, people, old, young, white, Black, poor, rich. I just wanted to see.’

However, the experience of witnessing ‘poverty almost unchanged since emancipation’, transformed him. ‘I never really thought much about race. But one thing that I have always been defined by is that I have an absolute repulsion to injustice and unfairness. And so, when I did this first trip in the South, when I was interacting with Black Americans, something happened. And this wasn’t anything that I would have ever conceived of occurring. But all of a sudden, in the course of ten days, I became a political person. I found my reason.’

Over the next seven years he was to return again and again to the outback areas of the South. Often, he would turn up in a town, go to the police station and ask which areas to avoid for his safety, then head straight for them!

The selection of prints on show are mostly striking portraits of young men, outdoors, with a direct confident gaze. Some have the context of their impoverished surroundings in evidence, but others do not. Either way, they are engaged images, their subjects confident in their own skin. Often when outsiders or the press appear, especially in communities which are usually invisible, people can respond with hostility, showiness or sometimes timidity. The expressions on the faces here, though, are more like those found in formal painted portraits.

So how did this outsider gain the confidence of the people he photographed? Lee, described himself as ‘shy, but single minded’, so prior to his road trips, when he was evolving as an artist, he forced himself to approach strangers on the street and ask to photograph them. Thus ‘I succeeded in transforming myself into a fearless photographer.’ He was also able to disarm people with his friendliness. People were also curious about him, as for many he was the first Chinese American they had met. Interestingly when he was asked if he met much hostility, he said, ‘only from white people’.

His unusual method of photography, using a large format camera on a tripod, also helped. It could take up to fifteen minutes to set up a shot, during which they could begin to know each other. Lee accumulated an archive of over 10.000 images from these journeys to the South, and whilst some of his work has been acquired by prestigious galleries, his photos have generally remained unseen. This changed last year, when the first ever collection of his work was published in a book, alongside a solo exhibition in New York, leading to him being celebrated by the New Yorker as ‘one of the great overlooked luminaries of American picture-making’.