Monday, 8 December 2014

LEWIS BALTZ: OBITUARY

Lewis Baltz: Obituary
This is a personal summary of the obituary of Lewis Baltz who was born on 12 September 1945 and who died on 22 November 2014. 
The obituary, by Sean O’Hagan, was published in The Guardian on 6th December 2014.
Lewis Baltz: Obituary
Baltz grew up in Newport Beach, California.  He graduated from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1969.  He considered himself to have always been an artist: he considered photography to be the best way of making a visual record.  His works ‘echoed and criticised the soullessness of urban planning and the corporate rationale that lay behind it’.  His photographs contributed to the redefining of American landscape photography in the early 1970s. 
His aesthetic was minimalist and dispassionate.  It ‘drew on contemporary art practice and rejected the romanticism of traditional landscape photography’.  The style was known as the ‘New Topographics movement’.  Particular concerns were the spread of the city into wilderness and the anonymity of suburbs.
A significant exhibition of the work of Baltz and seven of his peers was held in Rochester, New York, in 1975: ‘New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape’.  Compared with the other photographers’ work, Baltz’s work ‘was the most stark, his subject matter the most ordinary: concrete walls, garages, vast industrial warehouses, metal fire escapes, anonymous buildings, an absence of people’.  Baltz produced a series of photobooks in the late 1960s and early 1970s that typified his minimalism. 
The publication in 1975 by the Leo Casteli gallery of Baltz’s ‘The New Industrial Parks Near Irvine, California’ ‘signalled the artist’s entry into the conceptual art world’.  In the late 1980s Baltz moved to Europe where his work was identified alongside the work of Bernd and Hilla Becher (see the entry in this blog of 6th November 2014) and the Dusseldorf School.  The Bechers had been the only European photographers included in the ‘New Topographics’ exhibition of 1975.   Baltz was now working in colour, and making large-scale prints.  This led to a fascination with digital technology and its use in surveillance.  In 1992 the ‘Ronde de Nuit’ installation at the Pompidou Centre in Paris presented the subject of surveillance.
Baltz is recorded as having said: ‘I didn’t want to have a style.  I wanted (my work) to look as mute and as distant as to appear to be as objective as possible, but of course it’s not objective’.  O’Hagan observes that this is the essence of the power of Baltz’s work. 





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