{"id":4674,"date":"2014-11-24T00:24:46","date_gmt":"2014-11-24T00:24:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/?p=4674"},"modified":"2014-11-24T00:24:46","modified_gmt":"2014-11-24T00:24:46","slug":"lewis-baltz-1945-2014","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/?p=4674","title":{"rendered":"Lewis Baltz 1945-2014"},"content":{"rendered":"
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I met Lewis Baltz when I went to a workshop led by him at Paul Hill’s Photographers’ Place<\/em> in Derbyshire around 1979, having been greatly impressed by his work in ‘The New Industrial Parks near Irvine, California<\/em>‘<\/a> which I had seen in books and magazines from the US. Along with Robert Adams and Stephen Shore his work has had a great influence on my photographic practice.<\/p>\n

He brought the page proofs of ‘Park City’ with him to the workshop and we were able to compare them with his original prints, and I rather put my foot it in when I told him I felt that some of the book versions were an improvement on his original prints. He had only just received these and I think would probably have rather spent the time looking through them on his own than with us. I got even more into his bad books when I commented on the tonal problems of using the ultra-slow b\/w films he was working with that were not designed for pictorial photography. They were problems that I experienced too. Then he had been using some ultra-slow Kodak recording film, but later he moved to Technical Pan, and that was a beast I spent some years trying to tame to my satisfaction. When it was good it was very, very good, but…<\/p>\n

I don’t think he looked at the work of any of us taking part in the workshop – rather unusually, but it was a short workshop, certainly if he did I remember nothing he said about the work I had taken from my Hull project, but he was very generous in showing and talking about the work of the other ‘New Topographics<\/em>‘, including some who were hardly known in the UK. I think it was him who got me excited about the work of Robert Adams<\/em>, as well as that of Anthony Hernandez<\/a><\/em> and also Chauncey Hare<\/em>, with whom I later had a brief correspondence. I’ve not met Baltz to talk with since that workshop, but his death still came as something of a shock; someone I’d once spent a few fairly intensive days with and a man a few months younger than me.<\/p>\n

I well remember standing in a London bookshop a few months later with Park City<\/em> in my hand, looking though the images and trying to steel myself to buy it. But here in the UK it was I think \u00a350, roughly a week’s pay for me, and I reluctantly put it back on the shelf.\u00a0 Perhaps I would have gone without food for a few days, but it would be hard to explain to my wife and two sons. Of course it would have been a good investment.<\/p>\n

I still have the signed copy of ‘Nevada’ he sold at the workshop, and I did buy Chauncey Hare<\/em>‘s Interior America<\/em>, which was going cheap in a sale at the Photographers’ Gallery shortly afterwards, perhaps I was almost the only photographer here who appreciated his work. I wrote about him and the book perhaps 10 years ago on About Photography<\/em>, and was pleased when a new and larger book of his work was published in 2009.<\/p>\n

Baltz remained very much in the eye of the photographic public and I followed his work in the pages of some of the more expensive photographic magazines and at exhibitions such as Paris Photo, but there doesn’t seem to be a great deal of his later work on line.\u00a0 George Eastman House\u00a0 has a largish collection<\/a> of his very early work and there is more information on American Suburb X<\/a>. There is an interesting related note at SFMoMA<\/a>, who also have the best on line collection<\/a> of his work up until 1979 I’ve found, although only around a quarter of the 81 works listed have images available.<\/p>\n

You can also find some quotations<\/a> from him on the web, including this:<\/p>\n

I believed it was necessary to investigate photography, dismantle it, jettison all the non-essential components, and begin again with a stripped down but more powerful idea of what is, or could be “photographic”.<\/p>\n

and<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve thought that when people appear in a picture, they automatically are perceived as the subject, irrespective of how they are represented. I wanted the only person in the picture to be the viewer.<\/p>\n

Perhaps once you have stripped it down it isn’t too easy to know which way to go. The second quotation was a point of view in my own mind for years, though perhaps I have got over it now, and was perhaps behind my thinking for the photographic show I curated back in 2001, Cities of Walls, Cities of People<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I met Lewis Baltz when I went to a workshop led by him at Paul Hill’s Photographers’ Place in Derbyshire around 1979, having been greatly impressed by his work in ‘The New Industrial Parks near Irvine, California‘ which I had seen in books and magazines from the US. Along with Robert Adams and Stephen Shore … Continue reading Lewis Baltz 1945-2014<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,8,2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4674","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-my-own-work","category-photo-history","category-photographers"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4674","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4674"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4674\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4675,"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4674\/revisions\/4675"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4674"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4674"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4674"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}