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Photographer Frederick Baldwin, who documented wildlife, the civil rights movement, and American poverty, and helped promote fellow photographers from Latin America, Africa, and Asia, died in Houston on December 1. He was 92 years old.
His wife and co-worker, Wendy Watriss, said the cause was heart failure.
As a photographer, Mr. Baldwin displayed extraordinary physical prowess and a deep empathy that allowed him to come into the lives of the people he was documenting. He carried a camera while serving as a Marine in the Korean War, received two Purple Hearts, and survived the brutal 17-day Battle of Chosin Reservoir in 1950. His unit was photographed by David Douglas Duncan of Life magazine, who influenced Mr. Baldwin. on the career path.
In the 1950s and early 60s, he photographed Sami reindeer herders in Sweden and Norway, polar bears near the Arctic, and marlins off Mexico for Sports Illustrated, Esquire, and National Geographic.
“What was magical for me was that a small camera could serve as a passport to the world, the key to opening every lock and every locker of investigation and curiosity,” Baldwin said. An interview with The New York Times in 2019. “It was also a way to take me to places and situations to tell good stories.”
Mr. Baldwin was known as a master storyteller, but he realized that his early work was mainly done to satisfy his ego, as he noted in his memoir, “Dear Mr. Picasso: An Illustrated Love Affair With Freedom.” That approach changed in 1963 after he accidentally ran into a local civil rights march in Savannah, Ga. Witnessing the march led him to volunteer with the Chatham County Voters’ Crusade, led by a close associate, Hosea Williams. Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
“I found myself acting not just as a recorder, but as someone connected to events that would be useful far beyond my past existence or recent experience,” he wrote. “For the first time, I have simply and directly documented what I saw, whatever its value as a career boost.”
Mr. Baldwin, in Savannah, Dr. After photographing King, he served as Peace Corps director in Sarawak on Malaysia’s Borneo Island from 1964 to 1966. Back in Savannah, she documented hunger and malnutrition among poor white people in Georgia and South Carolina; these images were presented to Senator George S. McGovern’s Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs in 1968.
Some of Mr. Baldwin’s most important work has been done in partnership with photographer and author Ms. Watriss, who has received awards for her photography and whose books include Image and Memory: Photography From Latin America, 1866-1994. Edited with Lois Parkinson Zamor. In an interview with The Times in 2012, Mr. Baldwin and Mrs. Watriss described a meeting that began in 1970 at a cocktail party hosted by an Italian duchess at her Manhattan apartment, an event she called a “horrible affair”. (She shrugged and said, “It was the late 60’s.”)
Five months later he went to Europe to work as a freelance journalist. He started yoga. The following year, she said, she got him back and the two have worked and lived together ever since—although they didn’t get married until 2002, and later only in response to a dying wish from her brother, Robert Gamble Baldwin.
In 1971 Mr. Baldwin and Mrs. Watriss set off across the country in a small trailer to photograph and write about rural America. They parked their trailer on the land of Willie Buchanan, a Black farmer in Grimes County, Texas; lived there for a year and a half; and became part of the fabric of society. Together they took pictures there and recorded hundreds of hours of oral history, now housed at the Briscoe Center for the Study of American History at the University of Texas at Austin.
Anne Tucker, a former photography curator at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, noted that “without any discrimination as to who pressed the button,” each photograph carries the credits of both. “They did everything together”
Over the next few years, they also photographed German-American and Polish-American farmers, Spanish-speaking farmers, and a Black rodeo, all in Texas.
Mr. Baldwin and Ms. Watriss were the founding partners of the company. FotoFest in Houston, an arts organization dedicated to photography held for the first time biennial exhibition At the time, most museum curators in the United States and Europe believed that there were few photographers who had done important work in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. For three decades, the couple has helped launch numerous photography festivals around the world, traveling more than 100,000 miles a year to find and connect photographers, curators, editors, and collectors. They brought many photographers and their work to Houston for FotoFest.
Ms. Watriss said that as the exhibitions and accompanying portfolio reviews increase in size and international dimension, FotoFest has become “an extension of the values and attitudes we bring to our photography.”
Frederick Colburn Baldwin was born on January 25, 1929, in Lausanne, Switzerland, to Margaret (Gamble) Baldwin and Frederick William Baldwin, who served there as a career foreign service officer in the US State Department. After becoming Consul-General in Havana, the elderly Mr Baldwin died and his then 5-year-old son was sent to the first of a series of boarding schools and was expelled from many of them.
After Mr. Baldwin dropped out of the University of Virginia after his freshman year, he worked in an ice factory owned by his mother’s family with low-wage workers, black and white. It was there, he said, that he began to understand “the privilege that my race and my class gave me”.
Mr. Baldwin graduated from Columbia University in 1956. He married Monica Lagerstedt in 1961. They had two sons, Frederick and Charles, and they divorced in 1969.
In addition to Ms. Watriss, Mr. Baldwin is survived by his sons and a grandson. He lived in Houston.
In his memoirs, Mr. Baldwin described how, when he was a student at Columbia, he decided that he needed to meet, photograph and interview his favorite artist and “fictitious father figure” Pablo Picasso. He knocked on the door of the artist’s villa in the south of France and was turned down several times. After two nights in his car, he wrote a strange note with his own drawings and hand-delivered it to Picasso’s house. This time he was invited in.
The meeting led Mr. Baldwin to a “Picasso mantra” as a roadmap for future success.
“I had a dream,” he wrote, “I used my imagination, overcame my fear, and took action.”
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