A City All His Own

New York City, as photographed by Baldwin Lee in the latter half of the 1970s, looks as immemorially still as cities do in photographs made over a century earlier, when slow emulsions and long exposure times erased anything that moved while the shutter was open. Lee was raised in Chinatown. In 1975 he was seeing his hometown anew after seven years away at college and graduate school. He photographed mainly within a quarter-mile of the Brutalist complex on Worth Street that was his home base on return visits. From there he visited downtown locales he had known all his life, some changed or lost to change. A customary haunt, Radio Row, had been razed to make way for the towers of the World Trade Center, which dominated the skyline from every angle. Amid vistas he felt compelled to depict, he was put off by the sight of latter-day New Yorkers garbed in the styles of a new era. He hit on a simple way of unpeopling scenes: setting out before sunrise, he would carry his tripod, film holders, and 4×5 view camera to a chosen vantage point and photograph before the area stirred to life.The city as an empty stage or movie set constitutes a grand tradition in still photography. Charles Marvil...