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Baltz (Lewis) notebooks and ephemera
2015.M.27
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Title: Lewis Baltz notebooks and ephemera
Date (inclusive): 1987-2011
Number: 2015.M.27
Creator/Collector:
Baltz, Lewis,
1945-2014
Physical Description:
3.5 Linear Feet
(6 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: The collection of ephemera and
notebooks from photographer Lewis Baltz gives insight to his public exhibitions and daily
life between 1987-2011. The ephemera documents Baltz's group and solo exhibitions, while
notebooks dating from 1995-2005 present a detailed overview of Baltz's career-related
activities, meetings, projects planned and executed, and expenses. Also present are several
photographs of and by Baltz. Also present are several photographs of and by
Baltz.
Request Materials: Request access to the physical materials
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Language: Collection material is in English with some French, German, Dutch; Flemish, and
Japanese.
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 from 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 Leo 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, 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
Università Iuav 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.
Contact
Library Reproductions and Permissions .
Lewis Baltz notebooks and ephemera, 1987-2011, The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles,
Accession no. 2015.M.27.
http://hdl.handle.net/10020/cifa2015m27
Gift of Heidi Yorkshire and Joseph Anthony. Acquired in 2015.
The collection was processed in 2015 by Kathrin Schoenegg under the supervision of Kit
Messick. Material was rehoused and arranged in chronological order, and completely faded
thermographic paper was removed. The biographical/historical note was written by Beth Ann
Guynn.
Lewis Baltz Archive, 1967-2013, Getty Research Institute, Accession no. 2013.M.31.
The library additionally holds a copy of Baltz's portfolio
Venezia
Marghera
(2013), Special Collections accession number 2014.R.17*.
Scope and Content of Collection
The collection comprises ephemera and personal notebooks belonging to photographer Lewis
Baltz (1945-2014) giving insight into his public exhibitions and daily life between
1987-2011. The material directly complements the Lewis Baltz archive (2013.M.31). The
ephemera documents Baltz's solo and group exhibitions through invitations to exhibition
openings, catalogues, printed articles, reviews, and notices by and about Baltz. The
material relates to projects including
Nevada,
Rule Without Exception, and
The Deaths in
Newport Beach
. Also present are several exhibition-related postcards sent by
Baltz, two photographic portraits, and three photographs by Baltz originating from a press
package. The notebooks present a detailed overview of Baltz's career-related activities and
expenses between 1995-2004. In addition to information about his daily routines and private
musings, the notebooks discuss various planned and realised projects such as exhibitions,
art fairs, purchases, films, lectures, conferences, and book and magazine publications. The
collection also provides insight to Baltz's international network of friends and colleagues
in the art world including well-known figures in Canada, Europe, Japan, and the United
States.
Arranged in two series:
Series I.
Ephemera, 1987-2011;
Series II. Notebooks,
1995-2004.
Rian,
Jeffrey
Schifferli,
Christoph
Lyon,
Dominique
Steidl, Gerhard
Aigner, Carl, 1954-
Stahel, Urs
Amelunxen, Hubertus von
Baltz, Lewis, 1945-2014
Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles,
Calif.)
Fotomuseum
Winterthur
Kunst.Halle.Krems
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
New topographics (Photography)
Art, American -- 20th century
Art, American -- 21st century
Photographs, Original
Gelatin silver prints -- United States -- 20th century
Notebooks
Receipts (financial records)
Silver-dye bleach prints -- 20th century
Printed ephemera
Baltz, Lewis,
1945-2014