On every possible level, this is an extraordinary body of work: moving, illuminating, troubling, above all humane. At 72, and almost 30 years after he gave up photography, Baldwin Lee is having a long overdue moment. Eye mama was created by BAFTA-nominated filmmaker and photographer Karni Arieli during the pandemic, when everyone around the world was in lockdown and spending more time in the home, often consumed by caregiving. Employing a tripod-mounted 4×5 view camera, he photographed a range of subjects – architecture, pastoral scenes, people, Black and white, well-to-do and not, children and adults.

In the aftermath of my pictures of Black Americans, I devoted myself to learning digital photography.

The vintage images only burnish this spirit of fortitude in Black life, as—from our contemporary perspective—systemic racism and socio-economic disparity continue, if also alongside what Gerald refers to as “Black cultural resurrection. The melancholy infusing these circumstances is never chronicled from a vantage that is pitying, only deeply empathetic and profoundly arresting in its raw vulnerability.

There is a lot at stake there for some people when they suddenly see an outsider, especially an outsider with a camera. I’m photographing during the Reagan administration when he’s there talking about the trickle-down economy. I was an object of curiosity,” he tells me over the phone from his home in Knoxville, Tennessee, where he has lived since the early 80s. He’d been culturally isolated as a youth, immersed in New York’s Chinatown with little exposure to the greater art world, nor deeper American currents of generational inequalities and racial strife.All proceeded according to plan until he encountered a charismatic barefoot guru by the name of Minor White, at which point the college path went quickly sideways. And it has to do with how somebody’s outward demeanour can convey something about their identity or condition. I just remembered a photo you might enjoy seeing shot from the sidelines during one of the high school football games in the early 1960s. Some thirty years later, his first monograph has been published, Baldwin Lee, by Hunters Point Press, now in its second printing.