Baldwin Lee's Empathetic Eye

A museum highlights the photographer's detailed, compassionate pictures of hardscrabble lives

- By WILLIAM MEYERS

In 2022, Hunter's Point Press, a small publisher of books of art, poetry, art history and architecture, published "Baldwin Lee," a monograph of work the eponymous photographer had taken of black life in the American South 40 years before. The book was immediately acclaimed a classic, sold out, and is now in its third printing. The heretofore little-known Mr. Lee has since had prints exhibited in prestigious galleries and museums. In 2023, when his work was shown at the David Hill Gallery in London, he told an interviewer from the Guardian who asked about his choice of subject matter, "It stunned me that my fellow Americans had to live like this." The Ogden Museum of Southern Art has 47 of Mr. Lee's black-and-white prints on display through Feb. 16, in "Baldwin Lee," an exhibition organized by Richard McCabe, the museum's curator of photography. The pictures take us back to a markedly different time.