15 ms·

Baldwin Lee on his rediscovered images of the deep south

143 points by nkurz 4y ago

macintux 4y ago
> Often, on his arrival in a new town in Alabama or Mississippi, he would head straight to the police headquarters to ask for advice on which areas he should avoid for his own safety. Wherever the local sheriff warned him not to go, he went. Did he encounter any animosity on his lone travels? “The only hostility I experienced was from white people,” he replies. “I had a number of run-ins that were not pleasant – guns pulled on me, a rifle aimed at my face. There is a lot at stake there for some people when they suddenly see an outsider, especially an outsider with a camera.”
- lampshades 4y ago
  White people in these areas don't trust people from outside these areas. The only reason other people come to them is to paint the people in a bad light in some way or scam them (why else would anyone come? it's certainly not for work or pleasure). It has nothing to do with there being "a lot at stake," they just genuinely don't like outsiders. source: from these areas. edit: removed the "white" from people
  - mc32 4y ago
    It used to be, if you were a Yankee driving through Georgia on the way to Florida, a common corridor with NEasterners, they would often be advised to not detour off from the interstate, else risk get entangled in local "policework".
  - mimirs 4y ago
    The photographer in this case, Baldwin Lee, was Chinese-American and grew up in Chinatown in New York. So his experience was probably not due to this phenomenon.
    - lampshades 4y ago
      I think it's a safe assumption that holding a camera contributed to this phenomenon.
    - deelowe 4y ago
      If you're implying it's because he looks Chinese, you're right but not just because of racism. It's because no one who looks like that lived there. There's a long history of southerners being taken advantage of. Do they not teach about carpet baggers and indentured servants anymore in school?
      - throwayyy479087 4y ago
        The idea that the victor is ever anything but perfect is rarely in history books. The history of Southern exploitation is heavily covered in Socialist literature, though.
  - x86_64Ubuntu 4y ago
    Then why weren't black people pulling guns on him for "painting people in a bad light"? It's because in the South, the dominant white population has always hated any narrative that didn't show the chattel slave system or the Jim Crow system in a good, if not benign light. This links up with the history of the South and it constantly feeling that it's moral and social structure were always being under attack for being wrong.
    - lampshades 4y ago
      People don't come to the South to write stories that will paint the black people in a bad light. I can't speak for the time that this photographer went to the South, but nobody defends slavery or Jim Crow or, from what I can gather, cares about discussing it.
      - x86_64Ubuntu 4y ago
        There is an entire civil religion called Lost Cause Ideology which has defending the chattel slave system as a cornerstone of it's beliefs. It's the reason that there were so many confederate statues created in the 1920s-1970s, well after the end of the Civil War. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Cause_of_the_Confederacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Cause_of_the_Confederacy
        lampshades 4y ago
        Oh, wow, a Wikipedia page about something created in the 1920s-1970s. I actually learned about this through the internet several years ago. Not once in my entire life growing up did I actually hear about it.
        x86_64Ubuntu 4y ago
        You don't hear about it, it's a term used by others to describe a set of ideals held by many white southerners. Just because you haven't heard of something doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
  - AviationAtom 4y ago
    I think this discussion is a losing discussion, as history is recast as being strictly only one way. I could speak of the stories I heard on Thursday from a historian down here, but people would instantly discount it. It very much reflects our current times, where all is seen as either white or black, but nothing seen as a shade of gray. Polarization has benefitted no side, in any debate.
    - jfengel 4y ago
      Polarization benefits both sides. It just doesn't benefit the truth. Sometimes one side or the other is on the side of truth, but even then, the other side benefits from the uncertainty. The further they are from that position the greater the relative benefit. If there's even the slightest hint of gray they benefit even more. Representing the middle is a pure loss. Both sides benefit from the clarity of their positions and the ability to commit. Usually both sides will assume your are on one or the other, and both benefit from that. One side gets a slight advantage from your numbers. The other benefits more from painting you as the enemy who will stop and nothing to destroy you and must be stopped at all costs. Reality, it turns out, is badly overrated.
      - AviationAtom 4y ago
        It can be quite lonely and frustrating having any centrist views, for many of the reasons you mention. Many assumptions made merely on the basis of hearing but one view. The hive mentality is two sides of the same coin, but I don't think anyone is incentivized to change it.
        yieldcrv 4y ago
        Keep sharing your centrists views. Independents are the largest political bloc in the country at over 40% of voters. Partisans are not convincing, they are just loud and have representation. Everyone knows the ways in which both sides are different, we are frustrated by the ways in which they are the same, and that is valid too. Keep sharing, we’re watching. You’re not alone, we are actually more numerous than them.
  - themitigating 4y ago
    Don't make excuses for people who just default to mistrust and hate towards people they don't know.
  - bandyaboot 4y ago
    When you’re putting guns in peoples’ faces, they don’t need to paint you in a bad light. You’ve given them a photograph.
  - kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
    There is a social narrative that white poverty doesn't exist in the US even though it is the bulk of all poverty. I've been places exactly like those in the article but everyone is white. Someone making that explicitly visible exposes a truth that many don't want to have acknowledged.
  - elevaet 4y ago
    It's not just those areas. I had some months of "door-knocking" experience in Chicagoland, early noughties. The neighbourhoods tended to be racially segregated: Latino, white, or black. As a white person, we were often warned to avoid certain latino or black neighbourhoods by police and civilians, yet they were almost always more friendly and welcoming than white neighbourhoods, and never ended up being dangerous. In the white neighbourhoods there was a tendency to be greeted with suspicion, aggression, loud guard dogs, threats, and occasionally with guns. I imagine that the difference would be more pronounced if I was black and walking around in those same neighbourhoods.
  - kerpotgh 4y ago
    In my experience, Black and Latino people are very warm and welcoming on an individual level. It’s the about 5-10% of individuals in the community that wreak havoc, and the communities already know exactly who those people are.
- nonethewiser 4y ago
  If you don’t consider getting a gun pointed at you “hostility” then you’re not a reliable judge.
  - bobbylarrybobby 4y ago
    Is he not saying that it was the white people he encountered who pointed a gun at him?
- joenot443 4y ago
  Have you ever heard the term "carpetbagger" before? Folks in the South have grown wary of outsiders because of the some hundred years of history of visitors coming to these states with one goal in mind: to profit. Every abandoned coal mine, every rundown pain clinic, they're all representative of the same system which exploits poor rural Southerners and then turns around to paint them as rednecks and racists. If other commenters haven't spent much time with folks in the South, I feel like they'll never really understand exactly just where that perceived distrust of newcomers come from.
  - throwayyy479087 4y ago
    This this this this this. This problem is getting _worse_ in the superstar cities due to immigration: the questions I've had people ask me about growing up in the South from born-wealthy Indians, Brits are absolutely insane. People genuinely believe that Deliverance is a documentary, and that Now This' representations of the Deep South are 100% unbiased. The South in many ways sucks and I'm happy to talk about that, but the things that New Yorkers/SF/Seattleites believe about the region has very little overlap with reality. For example, there's a TON of Korean immigrants on the Georgia/Alabama line from Hyundai Kia plants who stay because it's so religious. People should talk about stories like that when discussing the oddities of the South, not JUST how awful Poor White Trash is.
zoklet-enjoyer 4y ago
Seeing his photo from 1973 makes me feel weird. He looks like any young guy on Instagram a few years ago. But he's this old dude now
- xsmasher 4y ago
  It'll happen to yooouuu! Kidding, but is there a word for this kind of Sonder? When you realize that your grandparents used to be people? Or when you notice that the "grown-ups" are now you, and you have no idea what you're doing? And that they probably didn't either? I get it when I realize "huh, this is the age my parents were when I was born," "this is the age they were when I went to college," etc. etc. We were always somewhat insulated from it because pictures of young-old-folks were all black and white, but kids born today will see the tiktoks that their parents made. I wonder if that will shorten the emotional distance.
  - dctoedt 4y ago
    > It'll happen to yooouuu! As a teen I teased my dad for no longer being the rail-thin fighter pilot of his early photos. He laughed and said, you wait, kid — and sure enough .... EDIT: Back then I was pretty "buff" from manual labor. Fast forward to maybe 20 years ago: My then-teenaged son saw a video (my late dad's home movies, digitized) of me, shirtless, during that era. Artlessly, my son blurted: Wow, Dad, what happened?
    - throwanem 4y ago
      When I was growing up in Mississippi, my mom always used to tell me youth was wasted on the young. I always laughed; she never did, and a few years ago I mentioned that I'd finally figured out why not. That made her laugh.
      - batch12 4y ago
        Yeah, there are truths that most of us don't understand until we have experienced them. I was told to enjoy being young, sucks getting old, you won't be able to eat like that forever... yeah yeah. We all know we die from an early age, but most of us don't fully comprehend what that means until we are older and our youth is gone.
Fauntleroy 4y ago
Just dropping in here to add that Baldwin Lee was an excellent photography professor, and is one of the big reasons I kept on doing photography as a semi-pro hobby long after college. A bright, kind, and enthusiastic man in everything he pursued. Wild seeing his name randomly come up here!
- throwanem 4y ago
  I'm glad it did! I know plenty about what white poverty in Mississippi looked like in those years, on account of growing up in it. Of black poverty I know next to nothing, because it was Mississippi, after all, and one wasn't encouraged. I hate that I need someone from nowhere nearby to show it to me, and at this late date besides - but I'm glad he was there to do it, and that he collected his work into the book a copy of which is on its way to me now.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
ZenThereWere0 4y ago
The photographs in this article resonate with me. As a young child in the late 1980s, I would ride along with my father on visits to various rural Black communities located in one of the states covered by Mr. Lee. One gentleman in particular stands out in my recollection. Aged nearly 90 back then, one of his grandfathers had been a slave and the other a White man. His son was a sheriff's deputy, and they both kept cows that still ranged free, even though stock laws had stopped the practice there in the late 1970s. Also, his wife was named after my great-grandmother. It was Faulknerian.
irthomasthomas 4y ago
Someone posted a street view link to a neighbourhood in Alabama, but it looks like they deleted their comment? Anyway, I came back to say that that one is going in to my No Place To Shit street-view project! https://i.imgur.com/IhjKX9r.jpg https://i.imgur.com/IhjKX9r.jpg
throwaway1492 4y ago
I’m sincere when I type this so I hope someone can help me understand. This type of “art” seems exploitative to me. Certainly many viewers are shocked by the poverty on display in the richest nation on earth. And that’s valid and understandable, and.. obvious? It feels like the people and their condition are cheapened and objectified by the pictures.
- pigsty 4y ago
  I grew up in a town very similar to this in the 90s. It’s nostalgic for me. Showing the conditions people live in isn’t necessarily exploiting them. Some of these people look very happy—take joy in their joy being captured and seen by hundreds of thousands of people decades later.
- ggm 4y ago
  Since the victorian era, photography has been used as part of welfare campaigning. It was heavily used to document the condition of the working classes in the UK, as part of the victorian attempt to alleviate systemic poverty. Photographs of the east end of london, Slums in britain at large, Slums of Glasgow, the tenaments. It continued throughout the 20th century. I am sure there were US equivalents documenting the condition of housing in Chicago, New York and surrounds. It was used during the depression as part of the WPA activity to document the conditions of migrant workers and displaced people in the dustbowl. It has been used consistently by primarily left wing parties to document social conditions as part of their campaigns for political change. "art" is a label. So is "agitprop". -If it was shot as "agitprop" but became "art" or it was shot as "art" and became "agitprop" does it really alter anything here? Diane Arbus was I think looking for the extreme in the social condition and individuals as "types".
  - mc32 4y ago
    For the UK (England, specifically), Chris Killip (specially In Flagrante): https://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/chris_killip/ https://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/chris_killip/ https://www.magnumphotos.com/arts-culture/society-arts-culture/chris-killips-enduring-connection-with-the-people-he-photographed/ https://www.magnumphotos.com/arts-culture/society-arts-cultu...
hattmall 4y ago
It's odd to think this is exclusive to the south. He could have just went and photographed the NYC projects. It's also not exclusive to that time period, which wasn't long ago, there are still neighborhoods that look just as rough or worse, largely black, in the US right now.
- wahnfrieden 4y ago
  he grew up in/around nyc projects
- woodruffw 4y ago
  There is shocking poverty across the US, including in our cities. But no, NYC's projects and the south's poverty were not comparable in either breadth or depth, and still aren't[1]. [1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/27/health/plumbing-united-states-poverty.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/27/health/plumbing-united-st...
  - nonethewiser 4y ago
    Very poor for sure. But she owns land. Compare that to people living in cells in the projects.
    - woodruffw 4y ago
      They’re apartments, not “cells.” And owning land doesn’t prevent indigence: it can make it worse. A good chunk of my family “owns land” in the Deep South, which is much more bucolic sounding than “lives in a mobile home next to the town dump.”
- rayiner 4y ago
  It’s not exclusive to the Deep South. It’s also in Appalachia and oddly enough in the Dakotas: https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2014/dec/01/jim-webb/jim-webb-says-poorest-us-counties-are-appalachia-a/ https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2014/dec/01/jim-webb/j... My dad, who grew up in a village in Bangladesh, visited West Virginia many years ago and was shocked by what he saw. It genuinely had never occurred to him that there were Americans without indoor plumbing.
nl 4y ago
If you've just read the HN discussion here, please click through to the article. The photographs are spectacularly good. This one in particular made me stop reading: https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/802853306d66c60d2e1dedb8ec2e25459f7aa828/0_0_6000_7552/master/6000.jpg?width=1000&quality=85&dpr=1&s=none https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/802853306d66c60d2e1dedb8ec2e2... (large size than what is in the the article).
- elevaet 4y ago
  The photos sit so well, just so. Great aesthetic and approach >Eschewing the socially concerned ethos that often underpinned the visual documentation of race and poverty in America at that time, Lee’s calm, measured portraits speak of a deeper engagement with his subjects You can really see that in the examples from the article. Such a neutral and consensual quality. I hope he entrusts his massive body of work to a good collection. Artistic merit aside, they would be extremely valuable historical records.
disposition2 4y ago
Another write up / interview from last October, in the New Yorker [1]. Thanks for sharing OP 1. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/photo-booth/baldwin-lees-extraordinary-pictures-from-the-american-south https://www.newyorker.com/culture/photo-booth/baldwin-lees-e...
2b3a51 4y ago
Mr (Dr?) Lee studied with Minor White and Walker Evans which as the OA points out is quite a contrast. The large format choice makes sense given the tradition those two mentors worked in (although I'm sure it was an independent choice). I think I'll try to get down to London to see this exhibition. William Christenberry is a photographer/artist from the southern USA who photographs and makes models that explore his heritage. His work may be of interest to some here.
mbeex 4y ago
Something was triggered here, "American Pictures" by Jacob Holdt. I read the book in my late teens in East Germany. It was promoted there for ideological reasons, but the pictures were impressive and in some ways similar to those in the article.

143 points by nkurz 4y ago

> Often, on his arrival in a new town in Alabama or Mississippi, he would head straight to the police headquarters to ask for advice on which areas he should avoid for his own safety. Wherever the local sheriff warned him not to go, he went. Did he encounter any animosity on his lone travels? “The only hostility I experienced was from white people,” he replies. “I had a number of run-ins that were not pleasant – guns pulled on me, a rifle aimed at my face. There is a lot at stake there for some people when they suddenly see an outsider, especially an outsider with a camera.”

lampshades 4y ago
White people in these areas don't trust people from outside these areas. The only reason other people come to them is to paint the people in a bad light in some way or scam them (why else would anyone come? it's certainly not for work or pleasure). It has nothing to do with there being "a lot at stake," they just genuinely don't like outsiders. source: from these areas. edit: removed the "white" from people
- mc32 4y ago
  It used to be, if you were a Yankee driving through Georgia on the way to Florida, a common corridor with NEasterners, they would often be advised to not detour off from the interstate, else risk get entangled in local "policework".
- mimirs 4y ago
  The photographer in this case, Baldwin Lee, was Chinese-American and grew up in Chinatown in New York. So his experience was probably not due to this phenomenon.
  - lampshades 4y ago
    I think it's a safe assumption that holding a camera contributed to this phenomenon.
  - deelowe 4y ago
    If you're implying it's because he looks Chinese, you're right but not just because of racism. It's because no one who looks like that lived there. There's a long history of southerners being taken advantage of. Do they not teach about carpet baggers and indentured servants anymore in school?
    - throwayyy479087 4y ago
      The idea that the victor is ever anything but perfect is rarely in history books. The history of Southern exploitation is heavily covered in Socialist literature, though.
- x86_64Ubuntu 4y ago
  Then why weren't black people pulling guns on him for "painting people in a bad light"? It's because in the South, the dominant white population has always hated any narrative that didn't show the chattel slave system or the Jim Crow system in a good, if not benign light. This links up with the history of the South and it constantly feeling that it's moral and social structure were always being under attack for being wrong.
  - lampshades 4y ago
    People don't come to the South to write stories that will paint the black people in a bad light. I can't speak for the time that this photographer went to the South, but nobody defends slavery or Jim Crow or, from what I can gather, cares about discussing it.
    - x86_64Ubuntu 4y ago
      There is an entire civil religion called Lost Cause Ideology which has defending the chattel slave system as a cornerstone of it's beliefs. It's the reason that there were so many confederate statues created in the 1920s-1970s, well after the end of the Civil War. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Cause_of_the_Confederacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Cause_of_the_Confederacy
      - lampshades 4y ago
        Oh, wow, a Wikipedia page about something created in the 1920s-1970s. I actually learned about this through the internet several years ago. Not once in my entire life growing up did I actually hear about it.
        x86_64Ubuntu 4y ago
        You don't hear about it, it's a term used by others to describe a set of ideals held by many white southerners. Just because you haven't heard of something doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
- AviationAtom 4y ago
  I think this discussion is a losing discussion, as history is recast as being strictly only one way. I could speak of the stories I heard on Thursday from a historian down here, but people would instantly discount it. It very much reflects our current times, where all is seen as either white or black, but nothing seen as a shade of gray. Polarization has benefitted no side, in any debate.
  - jfengel 4y ago
    Polarization benefits both sides. It just doesn't benefit the truth. Sometimes one side or the other is on the side of truth, but even then, the other side benefits from the uncertainty. The further they are from that position the greater the relative benefit. If there's even the slightest hint of gray they benefit even more. Representing the middle is a pure loss. Both sides benefit from the clarity of their positions and the ability to commit. Usually both sides will assume your are on one or the other, and both benefit from that. One side gets a slight advantage from your numbers. The other benefits more from painting you as the enemy who will stop and nothing to destroy you and must be stopped at all costs. Reality, it turns out, is badly overrated.
    - AviationAtom 4y ago
      It can be quite lonely and frustrating having any centrist views, for many of the reasons you mention. Many assumptions made merely on the basis of hearing but one view. The hive mentality is two sides of the same coin, but I don't think anyone is incentivized to change it.
      - yieldcrv 4y ago
        Keep sharing your centrists views. Independents are the largest political bloc in the country at over 40% of voters. Partisans are not convincing, they are just loud and have representation. Everyone knows the ways in which both sides are different, we are frustrated by the ways in which they are the same, and that is valid too. Keep sharing, we’re watching. You’re not alone, we are actually more numerous than them.
- themitigating 4y ago
  Don't make excuses for people who just default to mistrust and hate towards people they don't know.
- bandyaboot 4y ago
  When you’re putting guns in peoples’ faces, they don’t need to paint you in a bad light. You’ve given them a photograph.
- kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
  There is a social narrative that white poverty doesn't exist in the US even though it is the bulk of all poverty. I've been places exactly like those in the article but everyone is white. Someone making that explicitly visible exposes a truth that many don't want to have acknowledged.
- elevaet 4y ago
  It's not just those areas. I had some months of "door-knocking" experience in Chicagoland, early noughties. The neighbourhoods tended to be racially segregated: Latino, white, or black. As a white person, we were often warned to avoid certain latino or black neighbourhoods by police and civilians, yet they were almost always more friendly and welcoming than white neighbourhoods, and never ended up being dangerous. In the white neighbourhoods there was a tendency to be greeted with suspicion, aggression, loud guard dogs, threats, and occasionally with guns. I imagine that the difference would be more pronounced if I was black and walking around in those same neighbourhoods.
- kerpotgh 4y ago
  In my experience, Black and Latino people are very warm and welcoming on an individual level. It’s the about 5-10% of individuals in the community that wreak havoc, and the communities already know exactly who those people are.
nonethewiser 4y ago
If you don’t consider getting a gun pointed at you “hostility” then you’re not a reliable judge.
- bobbylarrybobby 4y ago
  Is he not saying that it was the white people he encountered who pointed a gun at him?
joenot443 4y ago
Have you ever heard the term "carpetbagger" before? Folks in the South have grown wary of outsiders because of the some hundred years of history of visitors coming to these states with one goal in mind: to profit. Every abandoned coal mine, every rundown pain clinic, they're all representative of the same system which exploits poor rural Southerners and then turns around to paint them as rednecks and racists. If other commenters haven't spent much time with folks in the South, I feel like they'll never really understand exactly just where that perceived distrust of newcomers come from.
- throwayyy479087 4y ago
  This this this this this. This problem is getting _worse_ in the superstar cities due to immigration: the questions I've had people ask me about growing up in the South from born-wealthy Indians, Brits are absolutely insane. People genuinely believe that Deliverance is a documentary, and that Now This' representations of the Deep South are 100% unbiased. The South in many ways sucks and I'm happy to talk about that, but the things that New Yorkers/SF/Seattleites believe about the region has very little overlap with reality. For example, there's a TON of Korean immigrants on the Georgia/Alabama line from Hyundai Kia plants who stay because it's so religious. People should talk about stories like that when discussing the oddities of the South, not JUST how awful Poor White Trash is.

zoklet-enjoyer 4y ago

Seeing his photo from 1973 makes me feel weird. He looks like any young guy on Instagram a few years ago. But he's this old dude now

xsmasher 4y ago
It'll happen to yooouuu! Kidding, but is there a word for this kind of Sonder? When you realize that your grandparents used to be people? Or when you notice that the "grown-ups" are now you, and you have no idea what you're doing? And that they probably didn't either? I get it when I realize "huh, this is the age my parents were when I was born," "this is the age they were when I went to college," etc. etc. We were always somewhat insulated from it because pictures of young-old-folks were all black and white, but kids born today will see the tiktoks that their parents made. I wonder if that will shorten the emotional distance.
- dctoedt 4y ago
  > It'll happen to yooouuu! As a teen I teased my dad for no longer being the rail-thin fighter pilot of his early photos. He laughed and said, you wait, kid — and sure enough .... EDIT: Back then I was pretty "buff" from manual labor. Fast forward to maybe 20 years ago: My then-teenaged son saw a video (my late dad's home movies, digitized) of me, shirtless, during that era. Artlessly, my son blurted: Wow, Dad, what happened?
  - throwanem 4y ago
    When I was growing up in Mississippi, my mom always used to tell me youth was wasted on the young. I always laughed; she never did, and a few years ago I mentioned that I'd finally figured out why not. That made her laugh.
    - batch12 4y ago
      Yeah, there are truths that most of us don't understand until we have experienced them. I was told to enjoy being young, sucks getting old, you won't be able to eat like that forever... yeah yeah. We all know we die from an early age, but most of us don't fully comprehend what that means until we are older and our youth is gone.

Fauntleroy 4y ago

Just dropping in here to add that Baldwin Lee was an excellent photography professor, and is one of the big reasons I kept on doing photography as a semi-pro hobby long after college. A bright, kind, and enthusiastic man in everything he pursued. Wild seeing his name randomly come up here!

throwanem 4y ago
I'm glad it did! I know plenty about what white poverty in Mississippi looked like in those years, on account of growing up in it. Of black poverty I know next to nothing, because it was Mississippi, after all, and one wasn't encouraged. I hate that I need someone from nowhere nearby to show it to me, and at this late date besides - but I'm glad he was there to do it, and that he collected his work into the book a copy of which is on its way to me now.

deleted 4y ago

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deleted 4y ago
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ZenThereWere0 4y ago

The photographs in this article resonate with me. As a young child in the late 1980s, I would ride along with my father on visits to various rural Black communities located in one of the states covered by Mr. Lee. One gentleman in particular stands out in my recollection. Aged nearly 90 back then, one of his grandfathers had been a slave and the other a White man. His son was a sheriff's deputy, and they both kept cows that still ranged free, even though stock laws had stopped the practice there in the late 1970s. Also, his wife was named after my great-grandmother. It was Faulknerian.

irthomasthomas 4y ago

Someone posted a street view link to a neighbourhood in Alabama, but it looks like they deleted their comment? Anyway, I came back to say that that one is going in to my No Place To Shit street-view project! https://i.imgur.com/IhjKX9r.jpg https://i.imgur.com/IhjKX9r.jpg

throwaway1492 4y ago

I’m sincere when I type this so I hope someone can help me understand. This type of “art” seems exploitative to me. Certainly many viewers are shocked by the poverty on display in the richest nation on earth. And that’s valid and understandable, and.. obvious? It feels like the people and their condition are cheapened and objectified by the pictures.

pigsty 4y ago
I grew up in a town very similar to this in the 90s. It’s nostalgic for me. Showing the conditions people live in isn’t necessarily exploiting them. Some of these people look very happy—take joy in their joy being captured and seen by hundreds of thousands of people decades later.
ggm 4y ago
Since the victorian era, photography has been used as part of welfare campaigning. It was heavily used to document the condition of the working classes in the UK, as part of the victorian attempt to alleviate systemic poverty. Photographs of the east end of london, Slums in britain at large, Slums of Glasgow, the tenaments. It continued throughout the 20th century. I am sure there were US equivalents documenting the condition of housing in Chicago, New York and surrounds. It was used during the depression as part of the WPA activity to document the conditions of migrant workers and displaced people in the dustbowl. It has been used consistently by primarily left wing parties to document social conditions as part of their campaigns for political change. "art" is a label. So is "agitprop". -If it was shot as "agitprop" but became "art" or it was shot as "art" and became "agitprop" does it really alter anything here? Diane Arbus was I think looking for the extreme in the social condition and individuals as "types".
- mc32 4y ago
  For the UK (England, specifically), Chris Killip (specially In Flagrante): https://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/chris_killip/ https://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/chris_killip/ https://www.magnumphotos.com/arts-culture/society-arts-culture/chris-killips-enduring-connection-with-the-people-he-photographed/ https://www.magnumphotos.com/arts-culture/society-arts-cultu...

hattmall 4y ago

It's odd to think this is exclusive to the south. He could have just went and photographed the NYC projects. It's also not exclusive to that time period, which wasn't long ago, there are still neighborhoods that look just as rough or worse, largely black, in the US right now.

wahnfrieden 4y ago
he grew up in/around nyc projects
woodruffw 4y ago
There is shocking poverty across the US, including in our cities. But no, NYC's projects and the south's poverty were not comparable in either breadth or depth, and still aren't[1]. [1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/27/health/plumbing-united-states-poverty.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/27/health/plumbing-united-st...
- nonethewiser 4y ago
  Very poor for sure. But she owns land. Compare that to people living in cells in the projects.
  - woodruffw 4y ago
    They’re apartments, not “cells.” And owning land doesn’t prevent indigence: it can make it worse. A good chunk of my family “owns land” in the Deep South, which is much more bucolic sounding than “lives in a mobile home next to the town dump.”
rayiner 4y ago
It’s not exclusive to the Deep South. It’s also in Appalachia and oddly enough in the Dakotas: https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2014/dec/01/jim-webb/jim-webb-says-poorest-us-counties-are-appalachia-a/ https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2014/dec/01/jim-webb/j... My dad, who grew up in a village in Bangladesh, visited West Virginia many years ago and was shocked by what he saw. It genuinely had never occurred to him that there were Americans without indoor plumbing.

nl 4y ago

If you've just read the HN discussion here, please click through to the article. The photographs are spectacularly good. This one in particular made me stop reading: https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/802853306d66c60d2e1dedb8ec2e25459f7aa828/0_0_6000_7552/master/6000.jpg?width=1000&quality=85&dpr=1&s=none https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/802853306d66c60d2e1dedb8ec2e2... (large size than what is in the the article).

elevaet 4y ago
The photos sit so well, just so. Great aesthetic and approach >Eschewing the socially concerned ethos that often underpinned the visual documentation of race and poverty in America at that time, Lee’s calm, measured portraits speak of a deeper engagement with his subjects You can really see that in the examples from the article. Such a neutral and consensual quality. I hope he entrusts his massive body of work to a good collection. Artistic merit aside, they would be extremely valuable historical records.

disposition2 4y ago

Another write up / interview from last October, in the New Yorker [1]. Thanks for sharing OP 1. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/photo-booth/baldwin-lees-extraordinary-pictures-from-the-american-south https://www.newyorker.com/culture/photo-booth/baldwin-lees-e...

2b3a51 4y ago

Mr (Dr?) Lee studied with Minor White and Walker Evans which as the OA points out is quite a contrast. The large format choice makes sense given the tradition those two mentors worked in (although I'm sure it was an independent choice). I think I'll try to get down to London to see this exhibition. William Christenberry is a photographer/artist from the southern USA who photographs and makes models that explore his heritage. His work may be of interest to some here.

mbeex 4y ago

Something was triggered here, "American Pictures" by Jacob Holdt. I read the book in my late teens in East Germany. It was promoted there for ideological reasons, but the pictures were impressive and in some ways similar to those in the article.