Baldwin Lee on his rediscovered images of the deep south | Hacker News Reader

Baldwin Lee on his rediscovered images of the deep south

theguardian.com

143 pointsnkurz95 comments

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.

> 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.”

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

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.

I think it's a safe assumption that holding a camera contributed to this phenomenon.

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?

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.

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".

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

I’m not saying it doesn’t exist but that maybe it’s not as prevalent as you think.

I’m aware of it but only through seeing folks online in comments (and generally they are folks not from the south) making me aware of it despite living in the the south for half a century.

No one I know down here wastes two brain cells dwelling on or “upset over the loss” from a war fought 160 years ago, but to read it online you’d think every other home has an altar to Robert E. Lee in a special alcove in their living room.

> set of ideals held by many white southerners.

I am a white southerner and have been for more than five decades, in all that time I have never met a single person who holds this view. I think if it was “many” I’d have encountered at least one in that time.

Sure you get the random redneck flying a tattered confederate flag outside their broken down trailer, but ascribing an adherence set of ideal to a complex philosophical hero worshipping belief system is probably a bit of a stretch.

If you were an African-American Southerner at the time, wouldn’t you be more worried about locals, for this sort of thing? Baldwin Lee is a Chinese-American art professor from New York, I suspect people would not be too worried that he might be a secret confederate.

That really isn’t an accurate summary of the ideology. Wiki:

> The Lost Cause of the Confederacy…claims the cause of the Confederate States…[was] not centered on slavery.

Personally I think lost cause is weird (to say the least) but they generally try to avoid, rather than defend, the slavery issue.

If you celebrate a war over slavery as heroic while falseley claiming it wasnt about slavery, that is glorifying slavery.

Same as holocaust deniers are glorifying the Nazi regimes murders by claiming it didn't happen, when they know it did.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Independents are technically unaffiliated, but they often vote for the same party in election after election. They may claim to be put off by partisan rhetoric, but it's usually effective at scaring them away from one party or the other. They may choose not to vote, but it's rare that they are truly centrist.

The "swing voter" has been called a "myth" for well over a decade, e.g.

http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/unpublished/sw...

Yes, after being presented with ridiculous choices chosen almost exclusively by partisans.

All states/parties now need to let independents vote in their primary elections, and the choices will smooth out. A couple states do already.

I don't think it's only a matter of partisans being louder, it's that partisanship is easier. Seeing only one side of an issue is always easier, in the same way that empathizing with only one of two (or more) sides of a dispute is much easier.

What are the shades of gray of racism or slavery?

The shades of gray are blacks and whites living in unison in many rural parts of the south in the time period in which these pictures were set. They lived together in poverty in many of these rural areas.

The historian I spoke of mentioned this. He could back it up with pictures of them co-mingling extensively.

Is it to say no racism existed in that time period? Hardly. But far too often I've seen it painted that the south is deeply racist to this day. Generally I only tend to hear it from people who have never been. I say this as someone originally from the north.

The south is indeed still deeply racist. I lived in Charleston SC for several years and was exposed to plenty of it. People like Dylan Roof and the McMichael family don't come out of nowhere. Doesn't mean there aren't Black and white people who do get along.

My wife and I were married in Clarksdale, MS, at the Shack Up Inn. We had several people of color in our wedding. While were told in no uncertain terms to avoid the local haunts, our party didn't.

Things didn't go great.

Lived in Georgia for six years. I'd say something like, "Venture out of any metro area and you'll see it,", but even that's being generous.

I'm sure it's progress compared to times past, but it's still got a way to go.

I lived in Georgia for seven years as a brown guy, mostly in Atlanta but also visited a fair amount around the coast and in Douglas, where my buddy used to live. I just got back from a trip to Tybee Island with my white wife and mixed kids. Never encountered any racism from a white person in Georgia.

YMMV. But in my experience, it was much nicer and less alienating to be down there than it is in a major liberal metro area amongst the "good white people."

I had an Indian friend who grew up in Alabama when his parents immigrated. We were both in San Francisco talking to a white guy and he said "Wow, that's must have been horrible growing up there!"

And my friend said "No, actually, I had a wonderful childhood. Never had any issues with racism, everyone was really nice."

There’s a cultural overlap between the American south and at least Bangladesh (and I assume some parts of India) that I appreciate. Small talk, face saving, indirect communication, social roles, expectations about timeliness, meals, hospitality, that I appreciate. (I grew up listening to country music because I guess that’s the closest thing on American radio to the village music my dad likes.)

Same with Korean evangelicals at Southern megachurches

Checkout Hilton Head Island, if you haven't already. It's pricey, but very nice. I've also heard the praises sung about Edisto and Jekyll too.

Jekyll is great. Also, I was just in Sea Island last year—amazing.

So you acknowledge the anecdotal evidence but then make the same accusation towards "liberal" cities? As if cities are solely composed of one type of political spectrun?

So the countless accounts of blacks in the south concerning racism mean nothing? I say that as a black person who is in the South and whose family originates from there.

Did they say it meant nothing? No.

Theyre just saying its more complicated than "all the south = racist" which is obviously true on its face

They're saying it's "more complicated than that" as a way to get away from the truth which is the South has always had race and white supremacy as a cornerstone of it's society.

How do you know that?

To me its sounding like they are saying "it's more complicated than that" as a way of saying - hey, yeah, racism exists in the south and is probably far more prevalent there than other places in the US, but there is a perception that every community in the south is racist on the whole, and that most or all individuals in the south are raised to be prejudiced.

Well that idea is obviously wrong, and is prejudiced view to have of the south, ironically.

No one is going to split hairs about the history of the South and how it affects policies even till this day.

Living together doesn't mean racism doesn't exist. Being originally from the north doesn't mean anything for your argument. The south has exchanged their deep racism with, at first a prejudice against gays, and when that group was too large such that it hurt elections they moved to trans people.

Yeah no. You are just making shit up

The shades of gray are that slavery hasn’t been a thing for 150 years and nobody in the south today, or even when those pictures were taken, had anything to do with it. Racism, meanwhile, is universal everywhere that different people live alongside each other. So pinning that uniquely on the south is a shade of gray too.

> The shades of gray are that slavery hasn’t been a thing for 150 years and nobody in the south today, or even when those pictures were taken, had anything to do with it. Racism, meanwhile, is universal everywhere that different people live alongside each other.

The American south is unquestionably better today than, say, the 1950s or 60s. But as a child I lived for a few years in the Deep South (specifically, east Texas) in the early 60s, and then again for a few more years (northwest Florida) in the late 60s, due to my dad's duty-station transfers. It was very racist — and changes in culture can often be slow.

A new New York Review of Books piece reviews a book that studies some of the ~1,000 racist murders — largely unpunished — that took place in the South between 1930 and 1970, in the teeth of federal Reconstruction-era legislation intended to protect Blacks. The piece brought to mind a tweet by an anonymous Army officer from awhile back: "[General] Sherman should have mowed the South like a lawn. With multiple passes." (Quoted from memory and so might be a bit off.)

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2023/04/06/a-regional-reign...

People forget that things like federal monitoring of elections weren’t limited to the South. Places like NYC and Boston were and in some ways still are very inhospitable to black people.

Slavery was a tool of control. Explicit control of the enslaved people and implicit control of the poor whites and others on the fringe of society. The intersection of race, class and poverty paints a picture that is complex.

That picture really isn't that complex for the black population living under such a system.

Don't make excuses for people who just default to mistrust and hate towards people they don't know.

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.

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.

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.

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.

If you don’t consider getting a gun pointed at you “hostility” then you’re not a reliable judge.

Is he not saying that it was the white people he encountered who pointed a gun at him?

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.

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.

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!

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.

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/802853306d66c60d2e1dedb8ec2e2... (large size than what is in the the article).

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.

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.

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.

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".

For the UK (England, specifically), Chris Killip (specially In Flagrante):

https://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/chris_killip/

https://www.magnumphotos.com/arts-culture/society-arts-cultu...

> I am sure there were US equivalents documenting the condition of housing in Chicago, New York and surrounds.

A famous example is photography of the Five Points slums in New York [1] that led to significant changes in the city.

[1] https://allthatsinteresting.com/jacob-riis-photographs-how-t...

They do straddle a line. It's the same line that ruin porn photographers face (though I think they have fewer scruples). Sometimes they are exploitative, but they are also being documentative (for example, the Dustbowl internal migrants captured by Lange, among others).

If you go to Today's Russia or Ukraine, you will find very similar conditions, often captured by wealthier European photographers. Are they being exploitative, are they documenting. It depends on the photographer and how they approach it. You can still grant the subject respect and decency.

I think many people would be surprised by how many people lived this way into the late 90s.

Even now, venture to mountainous regions of West Virginia and you can still find households without electricity or running water.

I think in this modern times people assume all such folks want those amenities, but are too poor to afford them, when really some of them couldn't be any happier to live as they do.

> seems exploitative to me

It would have been had the photographer made a lot of money off of the images, for instance.

He didn't. He was an art professor for most of his life- certainly did not significantly profit off of his art.

He interacted with the subjects and sent prints to them after the fact.

Would it be better if shocking poverty is not photographed?

The images in the article I think shows character, people surviving in difficult situations. There is humanity in every photo.

Maybe they wanted to be remembered? For people to see the truth of who they are, where they are?

I see these pics and I don't see poverty - I see beauty, pride and happiness.

Look at the guy lounging with his back to the car or the guy with his back to the tree in [1]. Can you imagine trying to tell them they are being exploited?

Or that the photo of the girl in [2] isn't a stunningly beautiful image?

And once needs to be careful considering poverty and the date these pics were taken. These people look well dressed, and the couple kissing clearly have jobs (see the hard hat hanging up). I had cousins who grew up in the 1980 in conditions that weren't massively different to this and we never considered them poor at all.

Or consider this: Are the pics in [3] of 1980's SF more of less exploitative?

[1] https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/bee576fea518043e1164ded4f42ca...

[2] https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/802853306d66c60d2e1dedb8ec2e2...

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/sep/30/public-matters...

I'm with you. I look at these pictures, and it's kind of intriguing to find the hints of the degree of poverty in there. The people in them dominate the pictures, and they seem well dressed, comfortable, healthy.

The faces are fascinating, there are entire stories in the faces.

I'd imagine people who throw around "woke" and being anti-"CRT" are the type who want nothing to do with photography of this type. Documenting what IS, is not exploitative, it simply is showing a snapshot of life in a particular place.

Why put the word art in quotes? We actually have one of our two political parties trumpeting about being anti-woke, and billionaires decrying "woke" as an evil mind virus to their legion of devoted followers.

Woke candy, woke railroads, woke banks.

Billionaires will be billionaires. Ordinary people will take photographs of people living their lives, exploitation may arise, if the purpose is to demean the subject and denigrate their life, their culture or circumstances. It appears as though that did not happen in this case.

> Documenting what IS, is not exploitative, it simply is showing a snapshot of life in a particular place.

Surely you can grant that some things that exist are exploitative. Your reasoning here amounts to exploitation not existing. Documenting something that exist (which is just documenting) can be exploitative.

A lot of wokeism is prefaced on a caricature of conservatives, and a denial that there's any possible valid ideologies driving these issues other than White Supremacy.

For the record, White Supremacy ideologies ARE how they got to the state put in the photos - but that doesn't mean that the people currently in charge are all neonazis. We don't apply that logic to NY state government w/r/t NYCHA or Newburgh or Far Rockaway, and we should extend that courtesy to people like Nikki Haley.

I hope you understand that not everyone shares your pre-occupation with the current era of culture wars that you show here. To one not in your "space" this comment reads very odd indeed; as in attributing malice where this is, implying things that aren't reasonably implied, manufacturing conflict?

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

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

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.

> 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?

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.

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.

I suffered from the opposite problem: I never wanted to be old, it always looked like a bad deal to me. I still don't want to be - I shirk my responsibilities whenever I can. With 3 kids its not often I get to though.

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.

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-e...

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.

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.

he grew up in/around nyc projects

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-st...

Very poor for sure. But she owns land. Compare that to people living in cells in the projects.

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.”

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/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.

I really wonder how a site like that "fact check" can get things so wrong. Like I just took most of the stats at face value until I see something I'm familiar with. In this example Hancock County Ga is about 70% black, not white as they state. As well, and I don't fault them for not knowing it, but it's truly about 95% black. The north end of the county is vacation homes that people will claim as a primary residence for tax purposes but practically no one lives there. It's over an hour on dirt roads to the nearest dollar general.

Or the massive amount of trailer parks

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