At 90, Photographer Fred Baldwin Still Has ‘So Much Work Left to Do’

Fred Baldwin reckons he could have become a writer — if the manual Olivetti typewriter he used while studying at Columbia in 1955 had spell-check. But his spelling was atrocious and he was impatient, so he tried photography instead. He had beginner’s luck: He talked his way into Pablo Picasso’s villa in the south of France during a summer break.

Those portraits started his career, but more important, they taught him a lesson that stayed with him for the next 65 years. “Have a dream, use your imagination, overcome your fear, and then the real secret to the whole thing: You have to act,” Mr. Baldwin, 90, explained.

This mantra took him around the world and then back to the United States to document the civil rights movement and poverty in the South. It also led him to start Houston FotoFest with his wife, Wendy Watriss, and helped him to begin dozens of similar photography festivals globally.

Now he has come back to writing — this time with spell-check — in his memoir, “Dear Mr. Picasso: An Illustrated Love Affair with Freedom,” published by Schilt. In it, he recounts in a self-deprecating manner his privileged childhood in Switzerland and Barbados as the son of a diplomat, as well as his lonely teenage years after his father’s death. He describes academic failure and aimless wandering before he fought in the Korean War and was awarded two Purple Hearts.

He returned to school at Armstrong Junior College in Savannah, Ga., as a much more focused student, and then transferred to Columbia. After encountering Picasso, he set out to learn his craft as a photographer.

“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,” he said. “It was also a way of taking me to places and situations that would provide me good stories to tell.”

In the book, Mr. Baldwin recounts how he lived among Sami reindeer herders in the Lapland region of northern Europe, explored the Arctic and photographed marlins underwater to impress Ernest Hemingway.

Looking back, he realizes that he was motivated partly by curiosity, but principally by having stories to tell at cocktail or dinner parties. “It was a huge ego trip,” he said. But that changed shortly after he returned to Savannah with his wife at the time, Monica. His book describes how he accidentally encountered a civil rights march in 1963.

“Protesters suddenly appeared marching down Bull Street in downtown Savannah, waving American flags and carrying signs: FREEDOM OR DEATH, DOWN WITH SEGREGATION, and WE WANT FREEDOM NOW!” he wrote. “Four hundred young men and women, mostly students, were singing ‘We Shall Overcome.’”

He started photographing the marchers and met their leaders, who included Hosea Williams, a trusted member of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s inner circle. Mr. Baldwin volunteered his services to Mr. Williams’s organization, Chatham County Crusade for Voters, providing photos for its publications and joining meetings. Mr. Baldwin understood clearly, he said, what was happening to black people.

“Economic discrimination was not news to me, nor was segregation or class division, but the difference lay in my becoming intimate with these realities in a totally new way,” he wrote. “And I was making photographs in a new way — for a cause, a cause that I knew was right. I found myself working in a spirit that drew on conditions that I had observed and experienced in my family’s factory, but now I was surrendering my secret God-given white self importance; that was new.”

For the rest of his life, his motivation in his photography was “to be useful,” he said.

In 1964 he became the Peace Corps director in Sarawak, a former British colony in Borneo that had become part of Malaysia the previous year. He moved there with his wife and their young son Breck, and they had their second son, Grattan, there. After two years he returned to photography and documented Peace Corps volunteers in Sarawak, Afghanistan and India.

Returning to Savannah in 1966, Mr. Baldwin did editorial assignments and photographed vacation resorts for the wealthy, earning as much as $1,200 a day. Just a few miles away, he photographed an extremely poor white community. Eventually, the images were used in testimony before Senator George McGovern’s Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs. But a local museum backed out of exhibiting them because it deemed them too controversial.

Disappointed, adrift, and with his marriage failing, he moved to New York. In despair he wrote 600 pages of self-examination in his diary, which later became source material for this memoir.

His life took an unexpected turn when he met a young journalist, Wendy Watriss. Their meeting sparked “a torrid affair” that eight months later transformed into a partnership, as they set out to document rural America together. That partnership shaped the next 50 years of Mr. Baldwin’s life. Together, he and Ms. Watriss photographed rural central Texas and then began Houston FotoFest, which now is one of the world’s most prominent photography events.

“I treasure freedom as the greatest asset you can possibly bring to bear on your life, but freedom is a very lonely affair and it is exhausting to maintain it,” he said. “To have somebody join up with me — to want to be free together — took the loneliness out and all of the energy could go into the doing as opposed to fighting off the loneliness.”

The book ends as FotoFest begins in 1983 leaving the next 36 years for a coming book about the festival — to be written, of course, by both Mr. Baldwin and Ms. Watriss.

Though he is now 90, he still works seven days a week. He has no choice but to live “quite a bit longer,” he said, because there is “so much work left to do,” including participating in a documentary and a book on the couple, as well as organizing their archives and writing the FotoFest book.

“It’s a joy for us to work together because we are bound by a determination to do something that is beyond ourselves that is going to help improve this very shaky world we live in,” he said.

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