Lewis Baltz
[Photographer, b. 1945, Newport Beach, California, d. 2014, Paris.]
One of photography’s early attractions for me was that it was – or could be made to appear to be – almost the same as ordinary vision; or at least it was the closest thing to that the arts offered. It had the illusion of being unmediated seeing, and it was that quality that I wanted to exploit…
In my research, my interest has always been with the phenomenal margin, those areas that are not quite landscape, not quite visible, the marginally taboo, the nearly obscene.
At that time a lot of the world was oddly obscene to photography—that is it couldn’t be portrayed… There seemed to be a horror of facing the environment that we’d made for ourselves. I felt, “Okay, this is the hand that you’ve dealt me—these are the fruits of mid-period American capitalism that you’ve given us. Well, look at them.
I don’t think we need [photography recording a real present] at all, any more; we already know, to the point of ennui, what the world looks like in photographs.
What a picture can eroticize is a different level of intelligence, which is erotic.
I remember that for some California photography exhibition in the 1980s, someone interviewed Robert Fichter, who described the photo community as being like a lovely little sun-drenched Greek Island. I thought that was really generous. I thought it more Appalachia than Santorini: some dank mountain valley where brothers have been screwing their sisters for generations, and everybody talks a little bit funny.
I thought art was a noble profession, because it was one of the few things one did in the world that was done for its own sake, and not for an ulterior motive.
When you see a group of images together, they create their own context, and, in a sense, their own text.
