Ogden Museum of Southern Art’s Curator of Photography, Richard McCabe and photographer Baldwin Lee will engage in a lively conversation celebrating Baldwin Lee, a landmark solo exhibition at Ogden Museum of Southern Art. Baldwin Lee will share stories from his 5 decade career as a student, educator and practicing artist. Topics of discussion will include Lee’s formal education with two of the 20^th centuries’ most influential photographers Minor White and Walker Evans to his making nearly 10,000 photographs in the 1980s – producing one of the most important visual documents of and about the American South in the past half century.

 This exhibition walkthrough is part of PhotoNOLA 2024 and will take place in the photography galleries on the third floor of Steven Goldring Hall  

Free and open to the public.

About the exhibition Baldwin Lee

Baldwin Lee features a selection of over 50 gelatin silver prints culled from thousands of images Lee made across the South in the 1980s, many being exhibited for the first time. The exhibition includes compelling portraits of Black Americans, as well as a collection of landscape and cityscape images that visually encapsulate the Reagan-era American South.

About PhotoNOLA

PhotoNOLA is an annual celebration of photography in New Orleans, produced by the New Orleans Photo Alliance in partnership with museums, galleries and alternative venues citywide. Showcasing work by photographers near and far, the festival includes exhibitions, workshops, lectures, a portfolio review, gala and more. PhotoNOLA draws hundreds of photography professionals to the city to partake in a variety of educational programs, and reaches broadly into the local community with exhibitions and events that are largely free and open to the public.

PhotoNOLA’s broad range of programming connects and inspires our community through photography. Each December, New Orleans shines as a prime destination for photography collectors, enthusiasts and professionals in the field.

About Richard McCabe

Richard McCabe received an MFA in Studio Art from Florida State University in 1998. Also in 1998, he received a Fellowship to New York University to attend the American Photography Institute, National Graduate Seminar. From 1998 to 2005 he lived in New York City where he worked for numerous art galleries and museums including The International Center for Photography, Robert Miller Gallery and the El Museo del Barrio. He also taught at Photography at Pratt Institute (New York City) and Montclair State University (Montclair, New Jersey).

In 2005, McCabe moved to New Orleans and started working within the curatorial department at Ogden Museum of Southern Art. In 2010, he became the Curator of Photography at Ogden Museum, where he still serves as the Museum’s photo curator today. He has curated over 35 exhibitions in the past 14 years including Eudora Welty: Photographs from the 1930s and 40s, The Mythology of Florida, Self Processing: Instant Photography, Seeing Beyond the Ordinary, New Southern Photography and Time, Spell, Practice, American, Body: The work of RaMell Ross.

About Baldwin Lee 

In 1982, Lee became a Professor of Art at the University of Tennessee where he founded the University’s Photography program. Lee is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship (1984) and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (1984 and 1990).  He has had solo exhibitions at the Chrysler Museum of Art (Norfolk, Virginia), Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia (Atlanta, Georgia), Howard Greenberg Gallery (New York City), Joseph Bellows Gallery (La Jolla, California) and David Hill Gallery (London, England).

His work is held in many private and public collections including the Ogden Museum of Southern Art (New Orleans), the Museum of Modern Art (New York), Yale University Art Gallery (New Haven, Connecticut), the National Gallery of Art (Washington, DC), The Morgan Library and Museum of the City of New York (New York City), The Nelson-Atkins Museum (Kansas City, Missouri), and The Do Good Fund Inc. (Columbus, Georgia), among many others. In 2022, Hunters Point Press published Baldwin Lee, a monograph of the photographer’s 1980s Southern photographs.

/// Event image: Baldwin Lee, Untitled, 1983-1989 Gelatin silver print, 16 x 20 inches, Collection of the artist