Frederick Baldwin — whose photography told stories
Frederick Baldwin, a photographer who documented wildlife, the civil rights movement and American poverty, and helped promote fellow photographers from Latin America, Africa and Asia, died Dec. 1 in Houston. He was 92.
His wife and collaborator, Wendy Watriss, said the cause was heart failure.
Baldwin displayed extraordinary physical courage as a photographer and a deep empathy that allowed him to get inside the lives of the people he documented. He carried a camera while serving as a Marine rifleman 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, which influenced Baldwin in his career path.
In the 1950s and early '60s, he photographed Sami reindeer herders in Sweden and Norway, polar bears near the North Pole and marlin in the waters off Mexico for Sports Illustrated, Esquire and National Geographic.
“What was magical for me was that a little tiny camera could serve as a passport to the world, as a key to opening every lock and every cupboard of investigation and curiosity,” Baldwin said in an interview with The New York Times in 2019. “It was also a way of taking me to places and situations that would provide me good stories to tell.”
Baldwin was known as a master raconteur, but he came to realize that his early work was done mainly for the purpose of satisfying his ego, as he noted in “Dear Mr. Picasso: An Illustrated Love Affair With Freedom,” a memoir published in 2019. That approach changed in 1963 after a chance encounter with a local civil rights march in Savannah, Ga. Witnessing the march led him to volunteer to work with the Chatham County Crusade for Voters, led by Hosea Williams, a close associate of Martin Luther King Jr.'s.
“I found myself acting not just as a recorder, but as someone bound up in events to be useful far beyond my past existence or immediate experience,” he wrote. “For the first time, I documented simply and directly what I saw, irrespective of its value as a career boost.”
After photographing King in Savannah, Baldwin served as the Peace Corps director in Sarawak, on Borneo Island in Malaysia, from 1964 to 1966. Returning to Savannah, he documented hunger and malnutrition among poor white people in Georgia and South Carolina; those images were presented to U.S. Sen. George McGovern's Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs in 1968.
In his memoir, Baldwin recounted how, as a student at Columbia, he decided that he must meet, photograph and interview his favorite artist and “imaginary 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 of sleeping in his car, he wrote a whimsical note with his own illustrations and hand-delivered it to Picasso's house. This time he was invited to come in.