Baldwin Lee insisted that one must look beyond the surface of all things, not just photographs of which are his profession. How much can one really know about anything they see from just a glance? The world of today is built on the first glance and first impressions. But what if we looked deeper into the innocuous pictures around us? Authentic knowledge comes from all the time spent below the surface. In the instance of regarding a photograph, one must dissect it and question the detail of the background. I argue that one could begin to define what one is looking at. Asking, “Is this true?” will not yield the answer. One must ask, “What does this mean?” Lee insisted that to understand a photograph’s real meaning one must have foreknowledge of a subject. “Looking is harder than it looks,” Walker Evans once remarked when discussing photographs. Lee as Evans’s apprentice took the master’s words to heart and has incorporated it into how he takes on his own work. To look at a historical photograph through modern eyes will not give the same meaning. The holistic view of the period must be understood in context to nurture a significant definition of a captured moment. According to Lee one must look for the aspect of a photograph that is out of place. And from the peculiar detail you can begin to extract the photographer’s original intent and discover what he is trying to convey in the photo. The significance of this detail tells a characteristic of the society of which we live and that we may not be known it existed. It is necessary to unlock these hidden meanings. They contain powerful ideas and truths about the world we live in and can offer up a new perspective for our minds to consider.
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