Lewis Baltz
[Photographer, b. 1945, Newport Beach, California, d. 2014, Paris.]
I’ve 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.
[Mixed-media photography] was genuinely an attempt to take photography beyond the physical limitations of the unaltered photographic print and enhance it with the plasticity, object-hood and visual surface of the other graphic arts. This work failed to gain wide acceptance outside the academic world... the complexity of the fracture usually took precedent over the nominal content of the work.
While one image may be more interesting or appealing than another, each photograph is of equal importance and requires the context of the entire body of work to make its meaning fully understood. Like scenes from a film, the individual photograph, when removed from the series, is a fragment.
The successful mission of photography was to deliver the world and all its contents into the category of the picturesque. None of which has anything to do with art.
Look at that... you don’t know whether they’re manufacturing pantyhose or megadeath.
(On one of his Industrial Parks photographs.)
I never did [understand L.A.], really: I always believed that God would destroy L.A. for its sins. Finally I realized that He had already destroyed it, and then left it around as a warning.
I use a high-art photographic technique to present views of nothing, that is, of no special interest per se.
Single frames in films don’t really work... whereas single-frame photographs are made that way.
