Chris Wiley on Baldwin Lee’s New York Photographs
The 1970s were not kind to New York City. A brutal recession, spurred by the 1973 oil crisis, wreaked economic havoc. Job losses mounted, hollowing out the city’s formerly robust manufacturing sector. Reckless monetary policy pursued by the Fed pushed nationwide inflation into the double digits. Crime flourished. Fires ravaged the Bronx. Ongoing white flight undermined the city’s tax base, ratcheted up social tensions, and drove urban decay. In 1975, the consequences of years of misguided municipal borrowing pushed the city to the verge of bankruptcy. It seemed, to some, like New York was never coming back. But the photographer Baldwin Lee was not so pessimistic.
Lee, who grew up in Lower Manhattan’s Chinatown, would eventually go on to make a body of photographs in the American South that stands among the medium’s great achievements. But he cut his photographic teeth, and made his first mature pictures, in the city of his birth, during its most benighted decade. These never-before-seen images, the majority of which are starkly beautiful, depopulated street scenes taken during dawn excursions with his 4X5 view camera, are currently the subject of a show at the Howard Greenberg Gallery. In them, we see a city of contrasts: seedy Times Square cinemas screening skin flicks; austere edifices sheltering the titans of finance; a muddy lot in Brooklyn with a sweeping view of both the Brooklyn bridge and the newly constructed World Trade Center. But despite the disparities between the city’s meanest streets and its highest-toned enclaves, the pictures don’t seem mired in despair. “I never gave up hope for the City,” Lee told me when I spoke with him via video chat, from his home in Tennessee, “Who could let New York City fail? It’s preposterous.”
At least some of Lee’s rosy outlook stems from his own childhood. He told me that the Chinatown of his youth was “like the Greek definition of the word ‘paradise’, a walled off, safe place.” It was, he told me, like growing up in a small town. “Everybody knew everyone else, everybody spoke the same language, everybody went to the same school, everybody went to the same church.”
Coming out of this environment, Lee then achieved something like the American Dream. The son of immigrant parents, he would go on to attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and then Yale University, and study with both Minor White and Walker Evans. (Tempering the sweetness of this success story was his father, who was profoundly disappointed that his son chose to pursue photography, rather than a more lucrative and secure profession.)
After graduating Yale, Lee stayed on in New Haven for a job as an assistant professor at the school, and to work as Walker Evans’s personal printer. It was around this time, during visits back home to see his mother in the Chinatown apartment that he had grown up in, that he began making his early morning forays to photograph empty New York streets. This work was the natural evolution of the architectural photographs that Lee had been making in graduate school, with a smaller, 35-mm. camera, and they were initially born out of personal necessity rather than inspiration. “When I began photographing the pictures of buildings,” he told me, ”I was about as shy a person as you could imagine. I blushed all the time, and had no nerve whatsoever.” Eventually, Lee was able to wrestle his way out of his crippling bashfulness—his photographs of people are among his finest works— but his interest in photographing the built landscape persisted.
As in his later pictures, the influence of Evans on this New York work is clear, particularly in the photographs that Lee made of signage—a perennial Evans subject—in Times Square. Then, just as now, these few square blocks were an obstreperous riot of ads and marquees, though its 70s incarnation was heavier on the sleaze. (One marquee advertises screenings of a “Big 3 Feature XXX Show” with top billing given to a flick called “Teenage Cruisers”. The building is now a theater that focuses exclusively on children’s programming.) But, true to form, Lee does not exclusively linger on the area’s debauchery. In a further nod to Evans, who famously included pictures of a pair of photographic portrait studios in his seminal book American Photographs, Lee has included among this cacophony of signs a couple cheeky moments of self-reference, in the form of a pair of ads for Yashica cameras and a store offering “Camera Discounts”.
These pictures from Times Square are some of the few from the series that Lee shot in the afternoon, and are among the only ones that feature people, though compared to any given afternoon in midtown today, they remain eerily free of pedestrians. As for the rest of the images, they are so still and empty that they invite thoughts of the apocalypse. (For anyone who lived through the darkest days of COVID in the city, the feel will be familiar.) But this is not to say that they are not without a certain levity. In one image that Lee took of a lonely dog tied up in front of what is still the Square Diner in Tribeca, you get the sense that the city’s people, like the dog’s owner, might not be gone for long.
The most obvious analog from photographic history that one could rustle up for these pictures is undoubtedly Thomas Struth’s similarly vacant, early-morning street scenes, which he took during a ten month period starting in December of 1977. In fact, it’s a wonder that the two photographers didn’t run into each other, as they were obviously keeping similar schedules. But whereas Struth’s pictures were both highly formal and formulaic, in keeping with the “typological” approach of his former teachers, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Lee’s work is less about the creation of photographic documents than it is about the act of seeing itself. In this way, they are perhaps closer to the crystalline, meditative visions of the American everyday presented by another contemporaneous chronicler, Stephen Shore, who was hard at work during this same period of the 1970s on the pictures that would become Uncommon Places. (Shore, perhaps not coincidentally, was also heavily influenced by Walker Evans, and briefly studied with Minor White.) When Lee talks about the act of making these pictures, he speaks in almost spiritual terms. “I imagine it's really similar to what a person feels when he's by himself on the beach and hearing the ocean come in,” he told me. “It allows you to be contemplative. It allows you to forget yourself.”
Discussion of Lee’s New York work would not be complete without mention of the Twin Towers, which appear in the background of many of the images. “I grew up in downtown Manhattan, and you always knew where the Trade Center Towers were,” he told me. “They were always telling you what direction you were walking in. It was like a compass.” When the Towers were destroyed by terrorist attacks on September 11th, 2001, he took it as a kind of personal tragedy. “I’ve always had a sweet spot for the Trade Center Buildings in my heart,” he told me. “I saw the Towers being built. It was a shock. It was as if your best friend had died in a car accident, and you were told. That was the feeling—that somebody near and dear to you just suddenly passed away.” As Lee was making these photographs, the Towers became a symbol of the resilience of the city that he loved, he told me, and a sign of its possible bright future. Now, almost exactly twenty five years after their destruction, the pictures have become a monument to their loss, and the loss of the lives of those who were there on that day. But could even such an unimaginable catastrophe make New York give up hope? In Lee’s words: preposterous