Baldwin Lee is a Chinese-American photographer and educator known for his photographs of African-American communities in the Southern United States. He has had solo exhibitions at the Chrysler Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, and received a Guggenheim Fellowship. His work is held in many private and public collections including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Yale University Art Gallery, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.

Lee was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1951. He received a BS from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1972) where he studied photography with Minor White, and went on to receive an MFA from Yale University (1975) where he studied with Walker Evans.
 

In 1982, he became an art professor at the University of Tennessee, where he founded the university's photography program. He then decided to take a tour of the Deep South, covering 2,000 miles over the course of ten days. During this trip, Lee widely photographed the people, landscapes, and cities of the South. After developing his photos, he realized that he had a particular passion for the African-American communities he had interacted with. He took a longer tour of the southern United States from 1983 to 1989, producing roughly 10,000 photographs.

The majority of this work focused on the lives of low-income African-Americans. When Lee arrived in a new town, he would visit the police station and let them know that he was planning to take photos with expensive photography equipment, so they could warn him about the poorer, redlined parts of town. Lee would then make a point of visiting these neighborhoods, since they had the highest concentration of Black residents.

In his work, Lee strived to represent his subjects as individuals with vibrant personalities, rather than reducing them to stereotypes or emphasizing their poverty.