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Baltz (Lewis) Archive
2013.M.31
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Contributing Institution:
Special Collections
Title: Lewis Baltz Archive
Creator:
Baltz, Lewis, 1945-2014
Identifier/Call Number: 2013.M.31
Physical Description:
54 Linear Feet
(49 boxes)
Date (inclusive): 1967-2013
Abstract: American photographer and author Lewis Baltz first gained recognition as one of the key figures in the New Topographic Movement
of the late 1970s, pioneering an approach to photography that refused to glorify industrial process, revealing instead landscapes
blighted by rapid development and human detritus. The collection encompasses Baltz's career spanning from his early black-and-white
Prototype Works of the late 1960s to his color projects of the early twenty-first century up to and including
Aqua Alta and
It's a Wonderful Life (2002). Included are original materials - negatives with printing notes, contact sheets, outtakes for images not selected
as part of a final project, proof prints, and duplicate final prints - as well as installation shots, exhibition ephemera,
and publications by and about Baltz.
Physical Location: Request access to the physical materials described in this inventory through the
catalog record for this collection. Click here for the
access policy .
Language of Material: Collection material is in English and French with some German.
Gift of Slavica Perkovic and Lewis Baltz. Acquired in 2013.
The collection is comprised of three series: Series I: Projects, 1967-2011; Series II: Books, portfolios and exhibition materials,
1988-2012; Series III: Printed matter and ephemera,1984-2013.
American photographer and author Lewis Baltz first gained recognition as one of the key figures in the New Topographic Movement
of the late 1970s, pioneering an approach to photography that refused to glorify industrial process, revealing instead landscapes
blighted by rapid development and human detritus. Born in Newport Beach, California in 1945, Baltz became interested in photography
at an early age and began photographing seriously at age 12. He poured over photography publications (early influences were
Ed van der Elsken, Wright Morris and Edward Weston) and frequented camera shops, especially William R. Current's store in
Laguna Beach, where the owner became his early mentor, employing him in the store at age 14. Baltz graduated from the San
Francisco Art Institute in 1969 and received his MFA from Claremont Graduate School in 1971.
Growing up in postwar Southern California Baltz witnessed first-hand the region's rapid transformation from open, agricultural
and desert space into a homogenized urban environment. By 1967 he had already begun responding to the changes around him,
creating tightly framed black-and-white photographs that recorded the generic, oft-overlooked details of these man-made environments
– the flat, expansive stucco facades punctuated by blank windows and exterior piping, signage, parking lots, empty closets
and set-like motel rooms of the new tract house developments and anonymous, light industrial and commercial urban spaces.
These early single images, which he first called the
Highway Series, were later to be collectively titled
Prototype Works.
From single images of generic, urban details Baltz went on to produce images in series such as
The Tract Houses (1969-1971),
The New Industrial Parks near Irvine, California (1974-1975),
Nevada (1977),
Park City (1978-1981) and
San Quentin Point (1981-1983) that charted, with minimalist precision, both the monotonous urbanization of once-isolated locations and the
newly-created wastelands on their marginalized edges.
Baltz's first solo show,
Tract Houses, was held at the Leo Castelli Gallery, New York, in 1971 when he was 26. His work gained further recognition with his participation
in the ground-breaking 1975 group exhibition
New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape, curated by William Jenkins, and first held at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York. Along with Robert Adams and
Joe Deal, among other photographers, Baltz advanced a documentary view of landscape which appositionally responded to their
photographic predecessors, such as Ansel Adams and Edward Weston, by abandoning all traces of the sublimity of the natural
world in their work in favor of a detached, critical view of urban and suburban realities and their terrains.
In his serial work of the 1980s Baltz gradually shifted from black-and-white to color photography. This shift coincided with
his feeling that he had exhausted the subject of the postwar industrial transformation of American landscape, and he began
moving from creating images evoking the past, however recent, to creating those meant to convey the future.
Candlestick Point (1984-1990), which includes his first color images (12 out of the 84 images in the series are color), explores the temporality
of the no-man's land between the San Francisco airport and the city's ballpark. In this series, Baltz's only United States
commission, he documented the desolate landfill that was destined to be made into Candlestick Point State Recreation Area.
Disenchanted with American Reagan-Bush era politics, Baltz moved to Europe in the late 1980s, where his use of color photography
coincided with a paradigmatic shift in his serial works from making what were essentially documentary images to making images
with a more explicit social and political content. He became especially interested in exploring the uses and abuses of new
technologies. In series such as
The Power Trilogy (1992-1995) Baltz explores the omnipresence of surveillance cameras and society's increasing dependence on and subsequent
vulnerability to powerful new science and medical technologies. Next, his practice further moved from making traditionally-sized
serial photographs suitable for gallery and museum viewing, i.e. in a "private" setting, to the creation of large-scale, site-or
audience-specific works, often manifested as a single image. These projects were primarily created for public spaces and broad
public audience participation. Furthermore, in works such as
Piazza Sigmund Freud (1989) and
SHHHH! (for Luxembourg) (1995) Baltz broadened his definition of what a "site" might be, moving from the concept of a concrete, physical place to
seeing a site as embodying a social fabric, a community or the history of a place. Yet, despite such shifts in his practice,
Baltz's subject always essentially remains the fraught and highly complex relationships between urban space, architecture,
landscape and ecology.
Seeing books as more democratic and less precious than original photographs, Baltz began publishing his serial work in 1974
with
The New Industrial Parks near Irvine California. Although he favored machine-made, mass-produced publications over unique handmade artists' books, Baltz nevertheless insisted
on achieving facsimile reproduction in order to create an experience closer to or even better than viewing an original photographic
print. His early books were published by Castelli Gallery. In 1993 Baltz met the publisher Gerhard Steidl, the printer for
the Fotomuseum Winterthur's (Scalo Verlag) reproduction of the catalog for Baltz's 1990 retrospective
Rule without Exception. Steidl became his primary publisher, producing new books as well as reprinting the early Castelli Gallery publications.
Baltz was the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards, including a scholarship from the National Endowment for the Arts
(1973, 1977), the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship (1977), the US-UK Bicentennial Exchange Fellowship (1980), and
the Charles Brett Memorial Award (1991). He had over 50 one-person exhibitions, not only at Castelli, where he was part of
the gallery's stable for a number of years, but also at museums and galleries such as the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Victoria
and Albert Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Tokyo Institute of Polytechnics, and the Albertina. His work
has also been in more than 160 group exhibitions, commencing with
California Photographers 1970 at the Pasadena Museum of Modern Art and including seven recent thematic exhibitions in 2011, three of which were associated
with the Getty initiative Pacific Standard Time:
Under the Big Black Sun: California Art, 1974-1981 (MOCA);
It Happened at Pomona: Art at the Edge of Los Angeles, 1969-1973 (Pomona College Museum of Art); and
Seismic Shift: Lewis Baltz, Joe Deal and California Landscape Photography, 1944-1984 (California Museum of Photography, Riverside). Baltz's works are found in museum collections including the Museum of Modern
Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Tate Modern, London; and the Museum of Contemporary Art,
Los Angeles.
Baltz taught in numerous East Coast and West Coast American universities as well as at the Universitta' IVAV di Venezia and
the European Graduate School EGS in Saas-Fee, Switzerland. He was married to the photographer Slavica Perkovic, with whom
he frequently collaborated. Baltz died in Paris in 2014.
Open for use by qualified researchers.
Eighty-six monographs, 26 serials, one video tape and one CD-ROM were transferred to the library. These publications may be
found by searching the library catalog for the Lewis Baltz Archive.
Scope and Content of Collection
The collection encompasses Lewis Baltz's career spanning from his early black-and-white
Prototype Works of the late 1960s to his color projects of the early twenty-first century up to and including
Aqua Alta and
It's a Wonderful Life (2002). Included are original materials-negatives with printing notes, contact sheets, outtakes for images not selected as
part of a final project, proof prints, and duplicate final prints-as well as installation shots, exhibition ephemera, and
publications by and about Baltz.
Series I, Projects, forms the largest portion of the collection. It contains original materials for most of Baltz's major
projects starting with his early single black-and-white images known first as
Highways Series and later renamed
Prototype Works. The projects are divided into two main groups: black-and-white projects and color projects. The former group roughly coincides
with Baltz's American work, while the latter group is primarily, but not exclusively, composed of his European work (i.e.
work he created after moving to Europe). This group contains a small amount of black-and-white work, especially among the
earlier transitional projects.
The work Baltz produced in the first half of his career was essentially serial in nature. He kept binders for each project
(or sometimes for groups of smaller projects) that housed the project's negatives, contact prints and printing notes. In addition
to these materials the series contains gelatin silver prints for a number of projects including
The Tract Houses;
The New Industrial Parks;
Nevada;
Park City;
San Quentin Point;
Candlestick Point (including two portfolios);
The Canadian Series;
Continuous Fire Polar Circle and
Fos Secteur 80. These prints can be proof prints, reproduction prints, duplicate prints or outtakes. Most are 8 x 10 inch prints although
there are a few larger and smaller prints; some are signed.
During the late 1980s and early 1990s Baltz continued to produce works of a serial nature such as his
89-91 Sites of Technology, yet he was also beginning to create large pieces both for museums and public spaces. The binders for the European projects
thus encompass a wider variety of materials. The materials for projects such as
89-91 Sites of Technology are similar to those found in the black-and-white work, albeit in color. The materials in other binders reflect both the
large-scale and transitory nature of Baltz's later projects and include original photographic materials used for creating
the projects as well as photographs, cds, dvds, and printed materials relating to the completed projects. Additionaly there
are color proof prints for
5W31 (Decay);
11777 Foothill Blvd.;
Piazza Pugliese;
SHHHH! (for Luxembourg); and
Gladesaxe, Copenhagen.
Series II is primarily devoted to materials that can be seen as compilations on Baltz's career. Included are binders compiled
for the two-volume retrospective publication
Rule without Exception; Only Exceptions (Göttingen: Steidl, 2012) and a binder of exhibition and installation shots. Although Baltz was a collaborator on the Steidl
project, the publication falls outside the scope of his original work and is thus not a project in the sense of Series I.
Jeffery Rian's
Rowboat portfolio is included here as an example of a group portfolio to which Baltz contributed.
Printed articles by Baltz; articles, reviews, and notices about Baltz; and ephemera from Baltz's solo and group exhibitions
comprise Series III. These materials, while undoubtedly incomplete, taken together nevertheless present a detailed overview
of Baltz's career. Also included are small amounts of ephemera from projects undertaken by Baltz's students at various institutions,
other assorted ephemera, a very small amount of late correspondence received or sent by Baltz and two photographic portraits
of Baltz.
The collection was processed by Beth Ann Guynn, Linda Kleiger and Lilly Tsukahara in 2013-2014.
Lewis Baltz Archive, 1968-2013, The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, Accession no. 2013.M.31.
http://hdl.handle.net/10020/cifa2013m31
Lewis Baltz notebooks and ephemera, 1987-2011, Getty Research Institute, Accession no. 2015.M.27.
The library holds a copy of Baltz's portfolio
Venezia Marghera (2013), special collections accession number 2014.R.17*.
Eighty-six monographs, 26 serials, one video tape and one CD-ROM were transferred to the library. These publications may be
found by searching the library catalog for the Lewis Baltz Archive.
Subjects and Indexing Terms
Chromogenic color prints -- United States -- 21st century
Chromogenic color prints -- Europe -- 20th century
Chromogenic color prints -- United States -- 20th century
Color transparencies -- Europe -- 20th century
Contact prints -- United States -- 20th century
Color negatives -- Europe -- 20th century
Contact prints -- Europe -- 20th century
DVDs -- Europe -- 20th century
Gelatin silver negatives -- Europe -- 20th century
Gelatin silver prints -- Europe -- 20th century
Dye difussion thermal transfer prints -- Europe -- 20th century
Photographs, Original
Gelatin silver prints -- United States -- 20th century
Landscape photography
Silver-dye bleach prints -- United States -- 20th century
Photography, Artistic
Silver-dye bleach prints -- Europe -- 20th century
New topographics (Photography)
Portfolios (groups of works)
Art, American -- 21st century
Art, American -- 20th century
Human ecology
Compact discs -- Europe -- 20th century
Photography, Industrial