Image: Baldwin Lee, Mulberry and Park Streets, 1975-79
Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York is showing ‘Baldwin Lee: New York (1975–1979)’, a presentation of large-scale black-and-white photographs that Lee took in the second half of the 1970s. According to the gallery, it is the first time these pictures have been exhibited. The show opened on 17 September 2026 with a reception at which the artist was scheduled to appear, and it runs until 31 October 2026.
Lee is best known for the photographs of Black communities in the American South that he made throughout the 1980s. The New York work comes earlier and belongs to what the gallery calls a formative period in his career. He grew up in the city’s Chinatown and studied photography under Minor White at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, then with Walker Evans at Yale University, where he completed his MFA in 1975.
In the years after graduating, he kept returning to New York with a 4 × 5 view camera. He worked early in the morning, often in winter, when there was hardly anyone on the streets. The gallery frames his interest as lying less in buildings as architectural subjects than in the city as a place formed by the people who use it. People seldom appear in the frame; their traces show instead in weathered pavements and facades, in shopfronts and in cars left at the kerb.
The works listed by the gallery range across Manhattan and beyond. Several titles centre on the World Trade Center, among them ‘1 World Trade Center from Worth Street’ and ‘World Trade Center as Seen from Cortlandt Street’. Others record Times Square, 42nd Street, 23 Wall Street, Nassau Street and the corner of Mulberry and Park Streets, alongside ‘Hasidic Protest, Park Row’ and ‘Diner, Varick and Leonard Streets’. Beyond Manhattan, the selection includes Front Street beneath the Manhattan Bridge in Brooklyn, a view of Manhattan from Brooklyn, and subjects in Queens such as a tennis court, Vernon Boulevard looking west, and silos beside a newspaper truck.
The exhibition has drawn notice in the photography and city press. Aperture put it on a list of 14 exhibitions to see this autumn, singling out an image of loft buildings in the financial district, apparently abandoned, beneath the twin towers. Curbed described the pictures as highly composed and remarked on how often the towers rise behind older loft buildings and the Cadillac Eldorados parked in the foreground.
