Baldwin Lee came to photographic renown pretty late in life, mostly for his in-close-and-intense pictures of small-town Black Southerners made in the 1980s and collected in an epic monograph in 2022. It took him a while to become someone who could make those photographs, he says, because he had been crushingly shy as a young person. ”I would turn red in the face anytime anything was about to happen,” he recalls, “and I set out to try to rid myself of this. I thought, as a photographer, one way to try would be to approach people to ask permission to make photographs of them. And to my surprise, almost nobody said ‘no.’” Once he broke through, the pictures began to really speak.
As a young adult, though, he made an entirely separate body of work, one that didn’t require as much personal interaction: From 1975, the year he graduated from Yale, until 1979, Lee photographed the downtown streetscapes of lower Manhattan, within walking distance of where he’d grown up in Chinatown as the son of a noodle manufacturer. These are highly composed photographs, made with a large-format 4x5 camera on a tripod. In them, again and again, peering over the shoulders of the dirty loft buildings and overscale Cadillac Eldorados, the twin towers of the World Trade Center appear. The towers were new then—”I remember the excavation of the foundation, and had always been just really fascinated and impressed with them,” Lee says—and their reflective metallic sheathing reads almost pure white in the photographs, doubly so against the sootiness of their beat-down neighbors. They reflect a basic principle of museum display: Putting something aged and grimy against something crisp and new creates drama.