Lewis Baltz is a visual artist and well known photographer who became an important figure in the New Topographic movement of the late 1970s.
Baltz graduated with a BA in Fine Arts from San Francisco Art Institute in 1969 and holds a Master of Fine Arts degree from Claremont Graduate School. He received several scholarships and awards including a scholarship from the National Endowment For the Arts, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, US-UK Bicentennial Exchange Fellowship, and Charles Brett Memorial Award. In 2002 Baltz became a Professor for Photography at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland. He is now living in Paris and Venice.
His work is focused on searching for beauty in desolation and destruction. Baltz images describe the architecture of the human landscape, offices, factories, and parking lots. His pictures are the reflection of control, power, and influenced by and over human beings. His minimalistic photographs in the trilogy Ronde de Nuit, Docile Bodies, and Politics of Bacteria, picture the void of the other. In 1974 he captured the anonymity and the relationships between inhabitation, settlement, and anonymity in The New Industrial Parks near Irvine, California.
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