Dear Mr. Picasso

Description

Dear Mr. Picasso: An Illustrated Love Affair with Freedom provides a versatile archive including hundreds of astonishing black-and-white and color photographs capturing integral moments of his career. From capturing a day and a night with the Ku Klux Klan, southern poverty, coverage of a star-studded Nobel Prize ceremony, cod fishing in the Arctic Norway, polar bear expeditions near the North Pole, and much more. —Kelly Caminero, Daily Beast.

This illustrated love affair with freedom shows how a camera became a passport to the world. The son of an American diplomat, who died when Baldwin was five, the book describes a string of disasters associated with six elite boarding schools and one university led to his exile to work in a factory where he joined low-paid black and white workers in his uncle’s factory in Savannah, Georgia. Baldwin escaped by joining the Marines and was immediately shipped to North Korea in 1950. Wounded and decorated twice, Baldwin also learned from the brutal, 35 below zero weather at the Chosin Reservoir where his unit was surrounded and outnumbered by the Chinese. After Korea, Baldwin moved to Paris, then returned to a junior college in Georgia, won a scholarship to Harvard and transferred to Columbia. Baldwin taught himself photography by visiting MoMa and every photo gallery in New York. Baldwin wanted to be a photojournalist.

By chance he spent a day and a night with the Ku Klux Klan and then he set out for Europe, heading for Scandinavia and the Arctic. What followed were picture stories about reindeer migrations, Nobel Prize coverage, underwater pictures of cod fishing in Arctic Norway, polar bear expeditions. After that he went to Mexico to photograph underwater the fight of hooked Marlin – an homage to Hemingway. In 1963, Baldwin joined the Civil Rights Movement, photographing Martin Luther King. A two-year stint as Peace Corps director in Borneo was followed by more photojournalism in India and Afghanistan. “I discovered the Civil Rights Movement by chance as I was walking the streets of Savannah planning a book on the city’s architecture. I met change marching toward me in the form of Benjamin Van Clark, a seventeen-year-old student leading his troops chanting into battle. The deep rumblings of the Civil Rights Movement in Georgia and elsewhere somehow had never reached me in Europe. As I wrote, ‘the polar bears I was photographing in the Arctic didn’t tell me about what was happening with Black folks in the South. They were just too white.’”

Features & Reviews
The New York Times
Daily Beast
Houston Chronicle
F-Stop
PBS NewsHour
Polka magazine (in French)
PDN Online
Photonews July-August 2019 (in German)
L’Oeil Photographie
fotoMAGAZIN August 2019 (in German)
PhotoBite
Leica Fotografie International magazine
Leica-blog 
Interview during Leitz Photographica Auction, June 2019
ASMP (American Society of Media Photographers)
PBS/Houston 88.7 Radio (27th of August, 2019)
The Guardian 
PetaPixel

ISBN 9789053309483
Design: Victor Levie, Levievandermeer
704 pages with hundreds of photos in full color and duotone