On the journey home from his graduation ceremony, Lee told his father he was going to pursue photography. Indeed, the photographer, a first-generation Chinese American raised in New York, seems an unlikely author of this acutely intuitive depiction of Black southern life given his lack of intimate connection to its cultural, racial and social realities.

I went to a public school that only had two non- Chinese students, even though this was New York,” Lee says, speaking from his home in Nashville, Tennessee. Swagger and sorrow in the eyes of almost every young Black man, including the one who stars in the book’s opening spread.Cattle gather precariously near an open pit, while in another frame kudzu threatens to swamp every edifice. The exhibition presents 30 photographs selected from the book, from an archive containing nearly 10,000 black-and-white negatives from the seven-year period. And it has to do with how somebody’s outward demeanour can convey something about their identity or condition.

So that, coupled with learning about the larger political, social and cultural world, primed me to combine my interest in photography, my interest in larger cultural and social issues, and my interest in political issues. A new book—the first-ever collection of Lee’s work—and a solo exhibition in New York make the case that he is one of the great overlooked luminaries of American picture-making. It is understandable why Lee stopped, but even his sense of justice and love of a great subject do not explain why he started – or why he kept going.ATL, a book of his photographs on the Atlanta airport, will be published this spring by Nazraeli Press.