Lewis Baltz

Lewis Baltz – Sobriety instead of passion as an artistic trademark

Lewis Baltz was born in Newport Beach, California on 12 September 1945. It was a region on the upturn, a prosperous environment, the rapidly advancing constructional development of which awakened an early interest in architecture in the young man. As a result, he worked for a time in construction before finally studying art history in order to avoid the threat of military service and participation in the Vietnam War. Baltz attended the San Francisco Art Institute until 1969 and subsequently acquired a Master of Fine Arts at Claremont Graduate School. In retrospect, Lewis Balt once explained that he didn’t particularly like photography but saw it as the simplest of all available methods to capture reality as directly as possible. It was probably precisely this extremely sober approach that allowed him his incomparably direct and distanced view of things. 

The start of the New Topographic Movement

Lewis Baltz approached his objects without artistic idealisation in an almost autistically intrusive and insensitive manner as was already evident in his most famous work from the series The Prototype Works created from 1967 to 1976. Here the photographer shows the inconspicuous, the self-evident, that which everyone sees but hardly anyone is aware of. Clips of house facades, single windows, signs, doors, and gates. The aestheticisation of the profane thus develops the fascination of a closed curtain that invites the viewer to catch a glimpse of what is hidden behind. The enlargement of the details sometimes leads to a surreal pictorial composition that lends Lewis Baltz’s photographs an abstract element. Baltz quickly attracted international attention with this way of photographing and had a style-defining effect on his discipline. In 1975, he took part in perhaps his most important exhibition: The presentation New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-altered Landscape, held at the George Eastman House in Rochester, is considered the founding act of an entire photographic direction of style. 

A critical view of the technologisation of the world

In the 1980s, Lewis Baltz moved to Europe and from then on used large formats for his photographs. Whether urban environments or landscapes, he was always looking for the traces of humans, for man-made structures. Baltz took a critical view of the increasing technologisation of the world and the helpless dependence into which man had placed himself. In addition to his artistic activities, he also turned to teaching and became a professor photography in Switzerland in 2002. Lewis Baltz published numerous photo books, a CD-ROM and several video projects. Today, his works are coveted all over the world and much of his art can be found in museums in Los Angeles, Chicago, Tokyo and Helsinki. A major retrospective of the celebrated artist was held in Bonn in 2012.

Lewis Baltz died in Paris on 22 November 2014.