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LEWIS BALTZ

b.1945

BiographyAttracting critical attention in the 1970s for his multiple landscape and environmental studies in California and Nevada, Lewis Baltz successfully melded the roles of theorist and practitioner over his nearly 40 year career. Baltz is an internationally acclaimed artist with numerous exhibitions and publications. His work is found in many museum collections in the United States, including LA County Museum of Art, Art Institute of Chicago, Baltimore Museum of Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Yale University, MFA Boston, MFA Houston, and numerous others in the United States and abroad. His work enormously influenced a generation of photographers grappling with the concept of objectivity and the role of the artist in photographs.

Baltz was one of ten photographers featured in the 1975 landmark exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape. The New Topographics movement signaled a radical change in landscape photography. The austere observations of photographers such as Lewis Baltz contrasted sharply with the dramatic formalism of Ansel Adams and Edward Weston. Originally used to describe a style “stripped of any artistic frills and reduced to an essentially topographic state,” the term New Topographics later came to identify the subject of the photographs, which explored man’s impact on the land. As suburban development started to spread across the United States, Baltz and others explored the effects of an increasingly industrial culture.

Baltz created several bodies of work during this period including New Industrial Parks (1974), Nevada (1978), Park City (1981), San Quentin Point (1986), and Candlestick Point (1989).

Baltz has lived and worked in Europe since the late 1980s. He turned to color photography and created images that explore and reflect structures of power, control, and influence of human beings. Influential publications of later work are Ronde de Nuit, Docile Bodies, and Politics of Bacteria (1990s). In recent years he has conducted an intensive summer seminar at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland, where he has an appointment as Professor of Conceptual Photography.

Entered by Kirsten Weber, curatorial assistant, 3/13/2012

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