Baldwin Lee’s black-and-white photographs of New York

Howard Greenberg Gallery presents Baldwin Lee: New York (1975–1979), an exhibition of large-scale black-and-white photographs. On view from September 18 through October 31, 2026, the exhibition brings together photographs Lee made between 1975 and 1979, a formative period in his career, and marks the first time they have been on view. A reception with the artist will be held on Thursday, September 17, from 5:00 to 7:00 p.m.
 
Raised in New York’s Chinatown, Lee studied photography with Minor White at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and later with Walker Evans at Yale University, where he received his MFA in 1975. In the years that followed, he returned repeatedly to New York with a 4 × 5 view camera, photographing the city in the early morning, often in winter, when its streets were nearly empty.
 
Lee approached Manhattan not as a collection of architectural subjects, but as a place shaped by human presence. Human figures rarely appear, yet their presence remains legible in the worn surfaces of streets and buildings, storefronts, and parked cars.
 
“My trips to New York City from New England were an exploration of buildings as organic forms. Rather than approaching the work as architectural photography, I saw it as a way of capturing a landscape,” said Lee. “It was my first time using a large-format camera. Early in the morning, with no one around, I felt an overwhelming intimacy—as if I were walking through my own private garden.”
 
Lee’s subjects include Wall Street at dawn, Times Square, and the streets and vacant lots of Lower Manhattan where the World Trade Center looms in the distance. He records a city suspended between neglect and ambition, where remnants of the past remain visible alongside the structures of the new. Seen fifty years later, the photographs read as both celebration and elegy—a record of a city perpetually erasing and remaking itself.
 
In 1982, Lee moved to Knoxville, Tennessee, where he established the photography program at the University of Tennessee. The following year, he began an extensive series of journeys through the American South. Between 1983 and 1989, he made nearly 10,000 photographs, principally of Black communities, creating the body of work for which he is now best known.
 
The New York photographs reveal a different but related aspect of Lee’s practice. Their careful organization of architectural space and sustained attention to the character of place helped establish the distinctive visual language he would carry into his later work. They demonstrate a sensitivity to form and order, but also to the humanity inscribed in the built environment. Lee’s vision of New York is a record of what people made, inhabited, altered, and left behind.

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.

About Howard Greenberg Gallery

Since its inception in New York 45 years ago, Howard Greenberg Gallery has built a vast and ever-changing collection of some of the most important photographs in the medium. The Gallery’s collection acts as a living history of photography, offering genres and styles from Pictorialism to Modernism, in addition to contemporary photography and images conceived for industry, advertising, and fashion.
 
Formerly a photographer and founder of The Center for Photography in Woodstock in 1977, Howard Greenberg has been one of a small group of gallerists, curators, and historians responsible for the creation and development of the modern market for photography. Howard Greenberg Gallery—founded in 1981 and originally known as Photofind—was the first to consistently exhibit photojournalism and street photography, now accepted as important components of photographic art.

The Gallery is located in the Fuller Building at 41 East 57th Street, Suite 801, in New York City. The Gallery’s archive is located at 32 East 57th Street, directly across from the Fuller Building, to house, manage, and present its collection of over 40,000 prints.

For more information, contact 212-334-0010 or info@howardgreenberg.com, or visit www.howardgreenberg.com.