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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