Baldwin Lee’s Extraordinary Pictures from the American South, by Chris Wiley, October 2, 2022
It’s not often that a body of photography is hoisted up from obscurity and straight into the canon. When this happens, the images in question are often the work of a self-taught master, such as the compendious Arkansas portraitist Mike Disfarmer or the Chicago nanny and eagle-eyed street photographer Vivian Maier, both of whose œuvres had been left to molder until they were rescued by keen connoisseurs. But the work of Baldwin Lee, a graduate of M.I.T., where he studied with Minor White, and of Yale, where he studied with Walker Evans, has been hiding in plain sight.
LESSONS FROM BLACK AND CHINESE RELATIONS IN THE DEEP SOUTH: BALDWIN LEE, ‘MISSISSIPPI TRIANGLE,’ AND THE LIMITS OF UPWARD MOBILITY.
By Imani Perry, The Atlantic, June 10, 2022
Mississippi Triangle is a 1983 documentary about the Black, white, and Chinese communities in the Mississippi Delta region, which I rewatched the other day, prompted by a message from a friend. It is one of a plethora of works in film and art that show, contrary to popular perception, that the South has never had just two racial groups.
