Lewis Baltz

This comprehensive book accompanies the first large retrospective exhibition of Lewis Baltz’s work following his passing in 2014. Lewis Baltz explores the artist’s oeuvre as a complex whole of interrelated series, from his first “Prototypes” and “The Tract Houses” to “Park City,” “San Quentin Point,” and “Candlestick Point” through to “New Sites of Technology” and “Venezia Marghera,”. The book simultaneously locates Baltz’s work in the context of photography and contemporary art since the 1970s, to fully examine his significant influence and legacy.

Baltz is one of the most prominent representatives of the New Topographics movement, which was seminal to the development of conceptual photography. His photo series document the impact of industrial civilization on the landscape, focusing on places outside the bounds of canonical reception: urban wastelands, abandoned industrial sites, warehouses. His photographs uncover the correspondences between everyday spatial forms and the more advanced forms found in art. Baltz’s strategies reflect a deep knowledge of the history of photography and present the photographer as a teacher of seeing who visualizes the world in reductive, often ironic, gestures.

About the photographer:

Lewis Baltz (Newport Beach, California, 1945 - Paris, 2014) is one of the most important photographers of the second half of the 20th century. His work has been usually associated with the generation of photographers that came together for the New Topographics exhibition, which questioned the concept of the landscape as beautiful, existential and almost sacred, and showed it as it really was, as a result of the almost always unfortunate intervention of mankind.

Baltz viewed the landscape as an urbanized, structured and populated space, and portrayed these constructions as being muted and virtually faceless. For him, natural scenery had become landscape as real estate, where the countryside and the city were worth exactly the same in monetary terms and, just like a surveyor, he measured it step by step and recorded it in his pictures.

Co-published with Fundación Mapfre, Madrid

1st Edition 

330 pages, 620 illustrations

26 x 24 cm

English