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Lewis Baltz

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Thanks for sending this our way...

I think I have a new "favorite" writer to follow...
 
Thanks for the link. I downloaded the PDF to my photography library.
 
 
If you like the banal, commonplace photography of William Eggleston, you'll like Baltz. He wasn't into aesthetic photography for the sake of beauty. Not my taste.
 
Alan Edward Klein said:
If you like the banal, commonplace photography of William Eggleston, you'll like Baltz. He wasn't into aesthetic photography for the sake of beauty. Not my taste.
Click to expand...

"Unfortunately, my life very rarely involved going to Yosemite [National Park, CA]. My life was about going to shopping centers, being in a town, an urban situation, which seemed to me was also a landscape but one that no one had any interest in looking at. But I was interested in looking at it." -- Lewis Baltz
 
Mark Minard said:
More Baltz:

Lewis Baltz | TateShots - YouTube
Click to expand...

Nice video. In it Baltz makes the interesting point that photography is a reductive art - it needs to simplify the view to reduce it to the interesting subject parts - as opposed to nearly all the other arts that begin with the equivalent of a blank canvas and add things to it. I am sure that people could dig up minor counterexamples, but it's a useful point.

Although Baltz and William Eggleston both have photographed things that seemed everyday to the point of (sometimes) escaping notice, I don't think their photographs or their practice (or subject matter) really resemble each other at all.
 
Nicknamed "Duke" according to a classmate that knew him c.1972...
 
I had never paid attention to Baltz's work and what I have seen has enchanted me. It is recognized that he had a very minimalist sensibility (type Rothko, Reinhardt, etc.). In that sense, he seems closer to Hiroshi Sugimoto or Uta Barth (or even filmakers as James Benning* ) than Eggleston.

Thanks for sharing.

*p.d.... some of his pics reminds me this movie: One Way Boogie Woogie

 
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reddesert said:
as opposed to nearly all the other arts that begin with the equivalent of a blank canvas and add things to it.
Click to expand...
Well, a photographer putting together a still life inside would usually start with a blank surface and add to it--even adding light as needed. On the other hand a sculptor might start with a block of stone or wood and remove parts of it to achieve the end result.
 
More Baltz:

A show at Corcoran Gallery of Art entitled "The Nation's Capital in Photographs, 1976"

Description from the Gallery Luisotti webpage (https://galleryluisotti.com/news/robert-cumming-lewis-baltz-at-the-corcoran-gallery-of-art/):
"In 1976 Robert Cumming and Lewis Baltz were included in “The Nation’s Capital in Photographs”, an unprecedented Bicentennial project originated by The Corcoran Gallery of Art. Eight eminent American photographers were invited to spend extended periods–at least a month–in Washington, D.C during 1975-76 to photograph the city, its environs and people, each was guided by their own vision."

I found the essay by curator Jane Livingston a worthwhile read. Exhibition catalog with essay and photographs here:

Enjoy!
 
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