Lewis Baltz | American, 1945 - 2014
Lewis Baltz was born in Newport Beach, California. He received his BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1969 and his MFA from Claremont Graduate School in 1971. That same year he was included in The Crowed Vacancy: Three Los Angeles Photographers, an exhibition that also included Anthony Hernandez and Terry Wild.
Baltz's photographs of the transforming American landscape defined a central role in 1970's landscape photography and influenced forthcoming generations of photographic practice.
He, along with other notable photographers including Frank Gohkle, Robert Adams, Stephen Shore and John Schott came to prominence through their inclusion in the groundbreaking and influential exhibition, New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-altered Landscape, an exhibition organized at the George Eastman House in 1975. Other notable exhibitions of that period included 14 American Photographers (1975) and Mirrors and Windows at the Museum of Modern Art (1978).
His serial work often took the form of published portfolios relating to a particular landscape theme or geographic location. Portfolios include: The New Industrial Parks Near Irvine, California (1974), Nevada (1978), Park City (1980), Candlestick Point (1989), and San Quentin Point (1985).
Baltz received two National Endowment for the Arts grants in 1973 and 1977 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1977. His photographs have been the subject of over 50 one-person exhibitions and seventeen monographs.
His work is in the collections of the J. Paul Getty Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Art Institute of Chicago, Tate Modern, among numerous others.