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Baltz (Lewis) Archive
2013.M.31
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Title: Lewis Baltz Archive
Date (inclusive): 1967-2013
Number: 2013.M.31
Creator/Collector:
Baltz, Lewis,
1945-2014
Physical Description:
54 Linear Feet
(49 boxes)
Repository:
The Getty Research Institute
Special Collections
1200 Getty Center Drive, Suite 1100
Los Angeles 90049-1688
reference@getty.edu
URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10020/askref
(310) 440-7390
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.
Request Materials: Request access to the physical materials
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Language: Collection material is in English and French with some German.
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.
Lewis Baltz Archive, 1968-2013, The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, Accession no.
2013.M.31.
http://hdl.handle.net/10020/cifa2013m31
Gift of Slavica Perkovic and Lewis Baltz. Acquired in 2013.
The collection was processed by Beth Ann Guynn, Linda Kleiger and Lilly Tsukahara in
2013-2014.
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.
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 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.
Landscape photography
Photography, Artistic
New topographics (Photography)
Art, American -- 21st century
Art, American -- 20th century
Human ecology
Photography, Industrial
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
Silver-dye bleach prints -- United States -- 20th century
Silver-dye bleach prints -- Europe -- 20th century
Portfolios (groups of works)
Compact discs -- Europe -- 20th century
Baltz, Lewis,
1945-2014