Lewis Baltz

Common Objects revisits Lewis Baltz's most remarkable series from The Prototype Works (1967-1976) to Ronde de Nuit (1992-1995), and interrogates for the first time the influence of European cinema (Antonioni, Godard, Hitchcock) on his work. Baltz's seminal series The Prototype Works, The Tract Houses (1969-1971), Candlestick Point (1987-1989), Sites of Technology (1989-1991) and Ronde de Nuit are presented in dialogue with stills from several films: Alfred Hitchcock's Saboteur and Psycho, Michelangelo Antonioni's Zabriskie Point, La Notte and Red Desert and Jean-Luc Godard's Les Carabiniers.

This long-awaited compendium of Lewis Baltz's writings from 1975 to 2007 is drawn from his critical writing for magazines such as Art in America, The Times Literary Supplement, L'Architecture d'Aujourd'hui and Purple. The book includes Baltz's texts on Edward Weston, Walker Evans, Robert Adams, Michael Schmidt, Allan Sekuka, Chris Burden, Thomas Ruff, Barry Le Va, Jeff Wall, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, John McLaughlin, Slavica Perkovic and Krzysztof Wodiczko, among others. This important publication gives Baltz's literary output the standing it deserves and offers a unique insight into some of history's leading photographers. Born in 1945 in Newport Beach, California, Lewis Baltz is a defining photographer of the last half-century. After studying at the San Francisco Art Institute and Claremont Graduate School, Baltz came to prominence with the New Topographics movement of the 1970s. His awards include a Guggenheim fellowship and the Charles Pratt Memorial Award, and his work is held in most major museum collections. Baltz's books with Steidl include 89-91, Sites of Technology (2007), Works (2010), The Prototype Works (2011) and Candlestick Point (2011).

This two-volume book covers the full sweep and depth of Lewis Baltz's influential oeuvre. Rule Without Exception is a reissue of Baltz's award-winning midcareer retrospective book which accompanied a travelling exhibition of the same name in 1991. The book surveys Baltz's work from The Prototype Works of 1967 through to Sites of Technology of 1991, showing the range of his images of industrialized landscapes and technological sites. Each section of the book is accompanied by installation views as well as texts by distinguished writers, some newly commissioned for this edition. Only Exceptions is a new book chronicling Baltz's work--now usually site-generated commissioned works--from 1992 to the present and is published on the occasion of an exhibition organized by the Kunstmuseum, Bonn. Only Exceptions includes Baltz's work in California, Leipzig's Black Triangle, Reggio Emilia, Groningen, Rome, Venice, and two projects with Jean Nouvel in France and Italy.

The New York curator Marvin Heiferman characterized Lewis Baltz’s landscape photography as a “topography of the emptiness of random, damaged, remote places”. The images in his 1989 series Candlestick Point show Californian fallow land, where piles of rubble and waste accumulate in the middle of the prairie. Traces of technical land development – drainage channels and water dams – are visible, becoming a typically American theme: the development of a territory in the almost infinite prairie. Baltz’s photographic record of the development at Candlestick Point combines sociological and analytical rigour and is strongly oriented towards the tradition of Land Art, and retrospectively pays tribute to its crucial influence on conceptual art since the 1970s. Candlestick Point was first published in 1989 and has been unavailable for decades, other than as an expensive collectible on the secondary photobook market. Lewis Baltz’s works have been the subject of over fifty one person exhibitions. Seventeen monographs have been published on his work. He came to prominence as a part of the ‘New Topography’ movement of the 1970s. Baltz studied at the San Francisco Art Institute and received a Master of Fine Arts from Claremont Graduate School in 1971. He is currently based in Paris and Venice.