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The Prototype Works
Beginning in 1965, but especially in the years between 1967 and 1971, Lewis Baltz made a body of work concentrated on the dialectic between simple, regular geometric forms found in the postwar industrial landscape, and the culture that generated such forms. Stucco walls, parking lots, the sides of warehouse sheds or disused billboards baked in the steady Californian sunlight. Baltz called his works "Prototypes," by which he meant replicable social conventions as well as model structures of replicable manufacture.
Marking Baltz's preliminary forays into a minimal aesthetic, The Prototype Works continued his work to capture the reality of a sprawling Western ecology gone wild.
Marking Baltz's preliminary forays into a minimal aesthetic, The Prototype Works continued his work to capture the reality of a sprawling Western ecology gone wild.
- GenresPhotography
188 pages, Hardcover
First published September 30, 2005
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August 26, 2014
Matthew Witkovsky's essay makes an astonishing argument, a translation of elusiveness. As viewer, you are not allowed to be absorbed by the content: that is, you are pushed out just enough to become a kind of anonymous prototype yourself. The reclaiming of individuality that follows is enigmatic:
"Baltz's photographs do not just "face" the viewer, frontal and planar, contradicting their own absorptive power as photographs; they work through the very problem of absorptiveness (the lush tones, the engaging surface textures and closely studied forms) to overcome it. In their flatness and lateral extent, the walls in Baltz's pictures suggest the prints themselves as walls that scatter our gaze. No one vantage point gives a better purchase on "place" or "narrative" or "pictorial incident" in these smooth and even surfaces: there is no privileged way into the setting. The beholder, in other words, is made to match the picture. She or he becomes anonymous, a prototypical rather than individual human observer. It takes recognition of the picture's framing, at exhibition or in a book, to restore individuality to the beholder of these photographs; contemplating the implications of a shared framing in a real, historically conditioned "man-altered" spaces, the viewer may come to a self-awareness that is both socially motivated and deeply personal.
That passage-from naive humanism to faceless anonymity to critical consciousness-gives the measure of achievement in the Prototypes. It is a passage to be posited only in photography."
This process is hugely different than "raising concerns" about the suburban development of America in the 1970s, land use, resources, etc., which seems a much easier, more common, less authentic position to take.
"Baltz's photographs do not just "face" the viewer, frontal and planar, contradicting their own absorptive power as photographs; they work through the very problem of absorptiveness (the lush tones, the engaging surface textures and closely studied forms) to overcome it. In their flatness and lateral extent, the walls in Baltz's pictures suggest the prints themselves as walls that scatter our gaze. No one vantage point gives a better purchase on "place" or "narrative" or "pictorial incident" in these smooth and even surfaces: there is no privileged way into the setting. The beholder, in other words, is made to match the picture. She or he becomes anonymous, a prototypical rather than individual human observer. It takes recognition of the picture's framing, at exhibition or in a book, to restore individuality to the beholder of these photographs; contemplating the implications of a shared framing in a real, historically conditioned "man-altered" spaces, the viewer may come to a self-awareness that is both socially motivated and deeply personal.
That passage-from naive humanism to faceless anonymity to critical consciousness-gives the measure of achievement in the Prototypes. It is a passage to be posited only in photography."
This process is hugely different than "raising concerns" about the suburban development of America in the 1970s, land use, resources, etc., which seems a much easier, more common, less authentic position to take.
Displaying 1 of 1 review