Top 11 Quotes & Sayings by Lewis Baltz

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an artist Lewis Baltz.
Last updated on September 19, 2024.
Lewis Baltz

Lewis Baltz was a visual artist and photographer who became an important figure in the New Topographics movement of the late 1970s. His work has been published in a number of books, presented in numerous exhibitions, and appeared in museums such as the Museum of Modern Art, Paris, Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. He wrote for many journals, and contributed regularly to L'Architecture d'Aujourd'hui.

I was living in Monterey, a place where the classic photographers - the Westons, Wynn Bullock and Ansel Adams - came for a privileged view of nature. But my daily life very rarely took me to Point Lobos or Yosemite; it took me to shopping centers, and gas stations and all the other unhealthy growth that flourished beside the highway. It was a landscape that no one else had much interest in looking at. Other than me.
I used photography to distance myself from a world that I loathed and was powerless to improve.
It might be more useful, if not necessarily more true, to think of photography as a narrow, deep area between the novel and film. — © Lewis Baltz
It might be more useful, if not necessarily more true, to think of photography as a narrow, deep area between the novel and film.
I assumed from the outset that photography was already art, and that I and other people working in photography were artists. I understand now that this was a minority point of view.
I never had any ambition to do anything commercial, anything journalistic. I wanted to be an artist, and I wanted to be an artist whose work was done in the medium of photography. It may be debatable to this day whether I ever succeeded in achieving that ambition, but the point is, I never had any uncertainty about that.
I believed it was necessary to investigate photography, dismantle it, jettison all the non-essential components, and begin again with a stripped down but more powerful idea of what is, or could be photographic.
Anyone can take pictures. What's difficult is thinking about them, organizing them, and trying to use them in some way so that some meaning can be constructed out of them. That's really where the work of the artist begins.
I wanted [my photography] to appear as though the camera was seeing by itself.
The photobook occupies that deep area between the novel and the film.
The ideal photographic document would appear to be without author or art.
Digital technology, you see, is not the villain here. It simply offers another dimension. I'm not sure if it's a farther remove from reality than analogue. I think if we can speak of reality, if reality and representation can be spoken of in the same sentence, if reality even exists any more, digital is simply another way of encoding that reality.
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