Lewis Baltz: Texts

by Lewis Baltz (Photographer)

This long-awaited compendium of Lewis Baltz's writings from 1975 to 2007 is drawn from his critical writing for magazines such as Art in America , The Times Literary Supplement , L'Architecture d'Aujourd'hui and Purple . The book includes Baltz's texts on Edward Weston, Walker Evans, Robert Adams, Michael Schmidt, Allan Sekuka, Chris Burden, Thomas Ruff, Barry Le Va, Jeff Wall, Félix González-Torres, John McLaughlin, Slavica Perkovic and Krzysztof Wodiczko, among others. This important publication gives Baltz's literary output the standing it deserves and offers a unique insight into some of history's leading photographers.

Born in 1945 in Newport Beach, California, Lewis Baltz is a defining photographer of the last half-century. After studying at the San Francisco Art Institute and Claremont Graduate School, Baltz came to prominence with the New Topographics movement of the 1970s. His awards include a Guggenheim fellowship and the Charles Pratt Memorial Award, and his work is held in most major museum collections. Baltz's books with Steidl include 89–91 , Sites of Technology (2007), Works (2010), The Prototype Works (2011) and Candlestick Point (2011).

Genres: Art, Photography

200 pages, Hardcover

First published March 12, 2012

Reviews

[Michael Vagnetti · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you've ever read the photobook Park City, one takes forbidding steps among rubble, piles, debris. These essays are left in that terrain, too. Breadcrumbs, mystic portals? You have to wince and contort in order to get your moral backbone to fit through the small spaces of its apertures. One gets the sense that the writer is taking you further than you might deserve to go.

There is a slow apocalypse happening, something to do with pictures, already having been put in motion.

"Thus photography inherited some of that portion of the American art audience too intellectually torpid to understand, much less take interest in, the kinds of issues raised by the best American art of the 1960s. Photography appeared more easily accessible. Which is its, though only superficially."

Also, in "A Better Tomorrow":

"In today's electronic panopticon visibility may bring only visibility, which is to say that artists are usually only able to engage a dialogue with persons already predisposed to have an interest in art and social issues. Those persons are usually neither the homeless nor the active conscious oppressors of the homeless."

[Fernando Gallegos · Rating 5 out of 5]

But Walker Evans was just a photographer, although one could paraphrase Duchamp’s judgement on Monet to add “but what a photographer”.

[Joseph Wilson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some very very insightful essays. Unfortunately an awful lot of typo errors.

[s2artM · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not only is Lewis Baltz, a great photographer he is also a good writer, the essays in this book are though provoking and easy to read. I also love the design and printing of this book. Exactly what you would expect form s Steidl publication!