Lewis Baltz
Ohne Titel
Ohne Titel, 1979
From Park City
Gelatin-silver print, 20.1 x 25.4 cm
Collection Fotomuseum Winterthur, gift Lewis Baltz
1997-036-040
© Lewis Baltz Trust
1945 (Newport Beach, US) – 2014 (Paris, FR)
Lewis Baltz’s photographic series are devoted to what seem like ordinary, everyday subjects such as industrial buildings, suburban housing estates and wasteland scenes. He documents the dark underbelly of technological progress and the massive growth of the consumer society in the 20th century. The 84-part series Candlestick Point, for example, shows the San Francisco Bay Area’s bleak landscape, which has deteriorated into an illegal dumping ground for industrial waste. The 102 photographs of his most extensive portfolio, Park City, track the construction of a dystopian-esque new development on the site of an old mining town in Utah. Baltz’s images, with their cynical, hopeless depiction of the future, are informed by a mix of attraction and repulsion, fascination and horror. His spare visual language and serial approach are evidently inspired by minimal art, conceptual art, pop art and land art. Baltz is one of the New Topographics photographers, who applied a matter-of-fact gaze and formal rigour to recording the development of urban spaces in the 1970s, generating a style that superseded classic US American landscape photography à la Ansel Adams.