Lewis Baltz

Lewis Baltz is known as one of the most prominent representatives of the New Topographics movement, the movement was seminal to the development of conceptual photography. The New Topographics movement was which began as a group of photographers including Lewis that shared a minimalist, detached and dispassionate aesthetic, while drawing on the contemporary art practice and rejecting the romanticism of traditional landscape photography. This is where Lewis's style of looking for typical, everyday things and photographing them as they are; his subject matter being the most ordinary things such as concrete walls, garages and metal fire escapes, but what all these photos had  was an absence of people. He is known to document side effects of industrial civilisation on landscapes, while he also focuses on places that lie outside the bounds of canonical reception, these photographs look at uncovering the correspondences between spacial forms that occur within the everyday world along with advanced forms which are found in art.

It is said that amongst his earliest works including The Prototype Works and The Tract Houses are what broke away from the mainstream traditions of photography, revealing what has become pronounced modernist references. 

I am keen on Lewis Baltz photographs which have been captured the exteriors of buildings, a majority of these are close up, allowing you to only have part of the building/wall to be in frame though others are taken from further out allowing you to see its surroundings. When looking at these images that he has taken you can relate them to the buildings that you have seen as they are mundane and typical sights that you would see on an everyday basis. The photographs tends to focus on the shapes and what they are actually of rather than romanticising it for what it is not; with the approach he has gone for it makes you look at the subject for what it is and look at finer details of what makes up buildings and such.