Steidlville

Baltz’s pictures are object-images, physical presences themselves, not representations of things. Although they are signs of real-world objects, they are also independent, archetypal forms…they have an inevitability, an inscrutability, a permanence, even a stateliness. His images demand more than contemplation and delectation: they demand reckoning….Baltz’s work exemplifies the ways in which photography, beginning some four decades ago, started to loose the bonds of its isolation within its own segregated history and aesthetics and began to take its place among other media. This publication helps to set the record straight by revealing Lewis Baltz’s significant role in this revolutionary shift.

Adam D. Weinberg, Alice Pratt Brown Director, Whitney Museum of American Art

Reproduced for the first time, Lewis Baltz’s earliest portfolio The Tract Houses (1971) and his preliminary forays into a minimal aesthetic, as represented in The Prototype Works (1967-1976), illuminate Baltz’s drive to capture the reality of a sprawling Western ecology gone wild. Together with The New Industrial Parks near Irvine, California, this trilogy reveals the indelible importance of Baltz in the changing course of contemporary photography.