He was also the first openly gay man I had encountered and at a time when it was difficult and complicated for someone like him to navigate in the world. The warmth and soulfulness of his work is not the result of intellectual effort; it’s grounded in understanding, a combination of intensity and restraint, and, surely, a shared sense of otherness.

His legitimacy was immediately confirmed when I saw his collection of very important photographs on his wall and a well-informed library of photography books. Steve Hoffman is a documentary photographer who has who spent the last dozen years working with and photographing the people that live the housing projects in Coney Island. Lee described his process, in the published conversation with curator Jessica Bell Brown, as beginning with unfolding a map, then traveling one hundred miles away from his home in any direction (“far enough from my known world to be prepared to accept the new”), then culminating with “flawed theater. The realization of the significance of thoughts and events stemming from early childhood to adulthood crystalized.Chinatown was my exclusive world, and it wasn’t until I went to college that I realised there’s other stuff going on here. Lee’s photographs are so compositionally tight and enjoyable that it’s easy to overlook their subtext, a world of engrained poverty, segregation, and disinvestment.

Prior to this period their efforts are preparatory, and afterward their work, although competent, never achieves the importance of earlier work.And it has to do with how somebody’s outward demeanour can convey something about their identity or condition. Employing a tripod-mounted 4×5 view camera, he photographed a range of subjects – architecture, pastoral scenes, people, Black and white, well-to-do and not, children and adults. BL Upon completion of my MFA I was appointed to the faculty of the Yale School of Art in 1975 where I served until 1979. The photographs of interiors especially confirm this: the details of disrepair, be it clipped-together curtains or discolored walls, never overwhelm the portrait subject, and in fact endear them to the viewer even more for being so candid.