Every morning, a young Chinese-American photographer fresh out of Yale would set an alarm for well before sunrise, drive from New England into Manhattan, then haul a wooden box camera and a tripod out onto pavements that were, by design, as empty as he could find them. That was Baldwin Lee’s routine through the winters of 1975 to 1979.
Lee was using a 4×5 view camera, his first time working in large format. We’re talking a dark cloth over the head, a single sheet of film loaded per exposure, a machine that rewards patience and punishes movement.
Point one at a busy road at rush hour and you’ll get a blur of legs and cab roofs. Point one at an empty street before dawn, though, and you’ll get something akin to what Lee got: doorways, fire escapes, silvered diners and the Empire State Building sitting still on the horizon, all rendered with the kind of clarity that only a large negative can hold…