As a first-generation Chinese American growing up in New York’s Chinatown, Baldwin Lee promised his father he would attend MIT. However, after enrolling, he was absolutely miserable until he took a photography class with Minor White. Lee quickly abandoned his studies of science and technology in favour of the arts, before going on to pursue his MFA, studying with Walker Evans at Yale.
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In 1982, Lee became a Professor of Art at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville and travelled for the first time to the Deep South. Excited to get to know the environs, he set off on a 10-day, 2,000-mile road trip, visitingLouisiana, Florida, and Georgia, photographing everything he found interesting along the way.
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“Walker Evans had photographed in this area 50 years earlier,” Lee says. “When I was travelling and looking at places he had gone, it shocked me that absolutely nothing had changed. You believed you had stepped back into 1935.”
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