Lewis Baltz: The Tract Houses

With his iconic, minimalist photographs of suburban landscape, Lewis Baltz was at the forefront of a revolutionary shift in the medium of photography. Baltzs work exemplifies the ways in which photography started to loose the bonds of its isolation within its own segregated history and aesthetics and began to take its place among other media. In the late 1960s and early 1970s Baltz became fascinated by the stark, man-made landscape rolling over Californias then still-agrarian terrain. His earliest portfolio, The Tract Houses (1971), and his preliminary forays into a minimal aesthetic, The Prototype Works (1967-1976), illuminate his drive to capture the reality of a sprawling Western ecology gone wild. His best known work from the period, The new Industrial Parks near Irvine, California (1974), was followed by two smaller projects, Maryland (1976) and Nevada (1977). In the following decade Baltz published three major books, Park City (1980), San Quentin Point (1986) and Candlestick Point (1989), exploring these themes.