Böcker av Lewis Baltz

Conceived and edited by artist Slavica Perkovic, this book for Lewis Baltz presents letters she asked Baltz's friends to write to him without seeing the images he had secretly made while teaching in Venice. (Baltz had told all he had stopped photographing; he had in fact continued to do so, walking the empty Lido beach to the Grand Hotel des Bains, then closed for renovation.) The first book of new material by Baltz since his passing in 2014, For Lewis Baltz. 8 + 38 texts. 14 images is shaped by the continuing resonance of his oeuvre, his absence and the complex notion of self.

In the late 1960s and early '70s Lewis Baltz became fascinatedby the stark, repellent, manmade landscape that was rolling over California's then still agrarian terrain. Baltz made a number of projects on this subject, the best known of which, The New Industrial Parks Near Irvine, California, was first published in 1974. With this book Baltz took his place near the center of the New Topographic movement, a newly coined term emblematic of a cool, distanced, yet critical view of the emerging man-altered landscape. The Topographic position, detached and glacial, has since influenced photographic practice in the United States, Germany and Japan.