OCMA | Orange County Museum of Art

Born in Newport Beach, California in 1945, Lewis Baltz is one of the most influential photographers working today. He graduated from San Francisco Art Institute in 1969 and earned a Master of Fine Arts degree from Claremont Graduate School in 1971. Baltz has presented his work in numerous exhibitions around the world, including the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. His work is in the collections of many institutions, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Photography, Tokyo; the Art Institute of Chicago; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki.
Baltz is best known as one of the icons of the 'New Topography' movement in photography of the late seventies. Presented together in the exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-altered Landscape in 1975 (Rochester, NY), this group of young photographers brought a shift in landscape photography in showing the images of a world far removed from an heroic vision of America. This move was also illustrated by the subject matter of urban and suburban realities under change, as well as the photographers' commitment to a critical and ironic eye of contemporary American society. Thirty years after its opening, this exhibition still remains one with the strongest impact on landscape photography world-wide in its attempt to define both objectivity and the role of the artist in photographic creation. Baltz' aesthetics is often referred to as 'counter aesthetics', as it reveals desolate landscapes and forgotten places with a dispassionate eye. His style is apparently expressionless and obsessive, as he examines his subjects over long periods of time. Since the 1990s he has worked on information architecture, exposing the crisis of technology, and following his interest in surveillance and cybernetics. Lewis Baltz died in Paris in 2014.