Watch this virtual talk with renowned photographer Baldwin Lee and Alicia Colen of Howard Greenberg Gallery, accompanying an exhibition of large-scale Manhattan cityscapes by acclaimed photographer Baldwin Lee will be on view at Howard Greenberg Gallery through October 31, 2026. Baldwin Lee: New York, 1975–1979 offers a compelling look at the formative years of one of American photography’s quietly resonant voices. Made in New York between 1975 and 1979 and printed in 2025, these works capture a pivotal moment in Lee’s practice before the celebrated Southern photographs that later shaped his reputation. Most of the images will be on view for the first time.
After growing up in New York’s Chinatown, studying photography at MIT, and completing graduate studies at Yale University in the 1970s, Lee returned to Manhattan to wander its streets with a camera. Visiting in the early morning during winter, when the streets were nearly empty, he made solitary urban landscapes that feel almost impossible today. Lee’s photographs were rooted in the exploration of the contemporary built environment, reflecting a disciplined attention to structure, light, and the organization of the photographic frame.
In 1982, Lee set out from Knoxville, Tennessee, with a 4 x 5 view camera, retracing routes associated with Walker Evans and photographing the South over the course of repeated
journeys. Between 1983 and 1989, he made nearly 10,000 photographs, a body of work now recognized as one of the most significant visual records of Black communities in the American South in the late 20th century.
Baldwin Lee: New York includes views of 42nd Street in its nefarious heyday, stark and vacant parking lots, ghostly mornings on Wall Street, as well as images of the World Trade Center, adding historical resonance in the year marking the 25th anniversary of September 11. As a whole, the works in the exhibition reveal the photographer’s foundation: a restrained, exacting study of structure, light, and composition that anticipates the humane clarity of his later portraits.
About Baldwin Lee
Baldwin Lee (b. 1951) is a Chinese American photographer, and former university professor of photography. Raised in Manhattan’s Chinatown, he studied with Minor White at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, receiving a Bachelor of Science in 1972, and with Walker Evans at Yale University, where he earned an MFA in 1975. After teaching at Yale and the Massachusetts College of Art, Lee inaugurated the photography program at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, in 1982, where he taught for more than three decades. His work has been exhibited at institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Knoxville Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, Atlanta; and Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans, and is held in collections including the Museum of Modern Art, Morgan Library and Museum, Museum of the City of New York, Yale University Art Gallery, and University of Michigan Museum of Art. He has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. His 2022 monograph Baldwin Lee brought renewed attention to his landmark Southern photographs. He lives and works in Knoxville, Tennessee.
© Baldwin Lee, Hunters Point Press, Courtesy of Howard Greenberg Gallery
Manhattan from Brooklyn, 1975-1979
Gelatin silver print; printed later
16 x 20 inches
From an edition of 10 + 2 APs
Signed in pencil on print verso.