Photographer Lewis Baltz, whose seminal 1984 works “The New Industrial Parks,” “Nevada,” “San Quentin Point” and “Candlestick Point” would redefine American landscape photography, passed away at his home in Paris, France, on Saturday, November 22, 2014. He was 69 years old.
Baltz was one of the most significant figures of the New Topographics movement that developed in the late 1960s, early 1970s. Together, the photographers from this movement would expand the definition of landscape photography through their famed exhibition, “New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-altered Landscape,” presented in Rochester, N.Y., in 1975. Their imagery presented American landscapes in minimal, stripped-down realities, void of notions found in previous landscape imagery that showed buildings or landscapes as symbols of prosperity or beauty.
