THE PHOTOGRAPHER BALDWIN Lee, a Chinese American, was born in Brooklyn (New York) in 1951. He studied photography at MIT and then at Yale. In 1982, he was appointed Professor of Photography at the University of Tennessee, where he established the university’s photography course. As a New Yorker born and bred, he was amazed at the contrast between living conditions in the southern states and where he had come from. He began making tours of the south, photographing members of various African Americans at home, at work, and at play. Over the years he took more than 10000 photos. All of them are in the black and white format. Apart from being fascinating glimpses of the everyday lives of low income ‘black’ Southerners, they are beautifully composed, superbly detailed images – well worth seeing, as we did recently at the David Hill Gallery in London’s Ladbroke Grove.

At his gallery, David Hill discussed Lee’s work with us. What particularly interested me was that Lee used (still uses) an old-fashioned field camera with a lens made before WW1. He chose this old lens because unlike modern lenses its glass has no coating. Also, and this is something I learned long ago, many of these older lenses were hand ground, rather than machine made. This resulted in the lens having a far better resolution than many of the best quality lenses that were available in the 1980s. The type of camera that Lee used to make his splendid photographs was not dissimilar to the kind of camera that early photographers such as Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879) used to create images. The lens on the simple camera that Lee used projects an image onto a ground glass screen at the back of the camera. In Victorian times, a prepared glass photographic plate used to be attached to the rear of the camera to capture the image. Lee, working more that 100 years later, captured his images on sheets of 5×4 inch high quality, fast negative monochrome film. Using these, Lee was able to create high resolution photographic images, and his subjects did not have to hold their poses for nearly as long as was the case when Cameron was creating her photographs. Because Lee’s subjects did not have to maintain their poses for more than a few seconds, his images are far clearer than Cameron’s whose subjects often had to try to remain still for many minutes. This meant that in addition to the deliberate artistic manipulations that Cameron made in her dark room, the inevitable slight movements that her subjects made added to the interestingly other-worldly images she created.

The advantage of using an old-fashioned camera and lens, such as Lee employed, was that it was a high-quality pin-hole camera. Unlike modern cameras, these present hardly anything that might alter the light entering the camera and affect the images.  I found it fascinating that apart from taking advantage of the improvements in film quality this superb photographer prefers to use a camera that would have been familiar to Julia Margaret Cameron rather than a modern one that made the light entering it take a complicated path from the outside world to the film surface.

You can read more about Cameron in my book, which is available here: