Lewis Baltz
The Park City Portfolio
September 26, 2009 - December 06, 2009
Opening Reception: September 26, 6:00 PM - 9:00 PM
Real Estate as Landscape
A few years ago, Angelo Mozilo, a founder and the CEO of Countrywide Financial, spoke at a Midwinter Housing Conference where he harangued the mortgage brokers in his audience to believe, as he said he did, that in America, "Homeownership is not a privilege but a right!" This message turned out to be less altruistic than he made it sound when, in 2008, he was indicted for fraud after his sub-prime mortgage company collapsed. That the setting for his pronouncement at the housing conference was the convention center in Park City, Utah, however, gave his words a certain historic, if ironic, significance. This was the luxury ski community whose construction Lewis Baltz had photographed in a way that suggested the American housing industry was becoming just the sort of mass-market flim flam Mozilo's career would both represent and fulfill.
Thirty years ago, Baltz was in the middle of the three years he spent photographing Park City, which was itself the middle passage of the three projects - The New Industrial Parks near Irvine (1974 - 75), Park City (1978 - 80) and San Quentin Point (1981 - 83) -that he considered the trilogy representing his greatest achievement in photography. Although there were other significant projects in his career of over twenty years as a documentary photographer, never again after the 1980s, when he was only in his forties, would he photograph with such intensity. He's lived since then in Europe.
Baltz was, with Robert Adams, a seminal figure in the movement that emerged in landscape photography in the mid-1970s and was known as "The New Topographics." The old California topographics that had lasted from mid-nineteenth-century figures like Carleton Watkins through the mid-twentieth-century career of Ansel Adams had celebrated the natural beauty of the West. But a new generation of photographers felt that this vision of pristine nature had about as much to do with the California of their day as the small-town Main Street at Disneyland did with the massive tract-house suburbanization of America then in full swing. Photographing tract housing, industrial "parks", dump sites and resort development, Baltz took a frontal view of his subjects that was implicitly confrontational. He cast an objectively cold eye on the sort of industrially produced housing that was being sold to the public with ad campaigns.
For many commentators, Baltz's work of the 1970s and 1980s has also evoked the then new aesthetic of Minimalism, which rejected Abstract Expressionism by emphasizing impersonal geometric shapes like the square or the cylinder and industrial materials like the anodized aluminum used by Donald Judd or the fluorescent lighting of Dan Flavin. Baltz's photographs of interior or exterior walls are definitely akin to such Minimalist compositions; yet his relationship to this aesthetic is as ambivalent as to the subject matter itself. He saw Minimalism, perhaps, as a drab art form appropriate to a commercialized, mass-produced society, not as a rejection or transcendence of it.
Baltz referred to his photographic technique as "forensic", a term that his Park City portfolio bears out. He depicted the place the way that Eugene Atget was said to have depicted Paris over half a century earlier: as if it were "the scene of a crime." Park City may have been a real crime scene. Its development into a weekend ski resort an hour's drive from Salt Lake City gave it a second life as a boom town; the first had been in the nineteenth century as the site of a silver mine, like the more famous town of Comstock. The mine on top of which Park City was built polluted the ground water and perhaps the landscape itself. Nonetheless, that landscape was being graded to create the new town, and the walls around the cellar excavations seen in the photographs were being back-filled with it.
Curated by Colin Westerbeck, Director
UCR/California Museum of Photography
2009
The Park City Portfolio
September 26, 2009 - December 06, 2009
Opening Reception: September 26, 6:00 PM - 9:00 PM
Real Estate as Landscape
A few years ago, Angelo Mozilo, a founder and the CEO of Countrywide Financial, spoke at a Midwinter Housing Conference where he harangued the mortgage brokers in his audience to believe, as he said he did, that in America, "Homeownership is not a privilege but a right!" This message turned out to be less altruistic than he made it sound when, in 2008, he was indicted for fraud after his sub-prime mortgage company collapsed. That the setting for his pronouncement at the housing conference was the convention center in Park City, Utah, however, gave his words a certain historic, if ironic, significance. This was the luxury ski community whose construction Lewis Baltz had photographed in a way that suggested the American housing industry was becoming just the sort of mass-market flim flam Mozilo's career would both represent and fulfill.
Thirty years ago, Baltz was in the middle of the three years he spent photographing Park City, which was itself the middle passage of the three projects - The New Industrial Parks near Irvine (1974 - 75), Park City (1978 - 80) and San Quentin Point (1981 - 83) -that he considered the trilogy representing his greatest achievement in photography. Although there were other significant projects in his career of over twenty years as a documentary photographer, never again after the 1980s, when he was only in his forties, would he photograph with such intensity. He's lived since then in Europe.
Baltz was, with Robert Adams, a seminal figure in the movement that emerged in landscape photography in the mid-1970s and was known as "The New Topographics." The old California topographics that had lasted from mid-nineteenth-century figures like Carleton Watkins through the mid-twentieth-century career of Ansel Adams had celebrated the natural beauty of the West. But a new generation of photographers felt that this vision of pristine nature had about as much to do with the California of their day as the small-town Main Street at Disneyland did with the massive tract-house suburbanization of America then in full swing. Photographing tract housing, industrial "parks", dump sites and resort development, Baltz took a frontal view of his subjects that was implicitly confrontational. He cast an objectively cold eye on the sort of industrially produced housing that was being sold to the public with ad campaigns.
For many commentators, Baltz's work of the 1970s and 1980s has also evoked the then new aesthetic of Minimalism, which rejected Abstract Expressionism by emphasizing impersonal geometric shapes like the square or the cylinder and industrial materials like the anodized aluminum used by Donald Judd or the fluorescent lighting of Dan Flavin. Baltz's photographs of interior or exterior walls are definitely akin to such Minimalist compositions; yet his relationship to this aesthetic is as ambivalent as to the subject matter itself. He saw Minimalism, perhaps, as a drab art form appropriate to a commercialized, mass-produced society, not as a rejection or transcendence of it.
Baltz referred to his photographic technique as "forensic", a term that his Park City portfolio bears out. He depicted the place the way that Eugene Atget was said to have depicted Paris over half a century earlier: as if it were "the scene of a crime." Park City may have been a real crime scene. Its development into a weekend ski resort an hour's drive from Salt Lake City gave it a second life as a boom town; the first had been in the nineteenth century as the site of a silver mine, like the more famous town of Comstock. The mine on top of which Park City was built polluted the ground water and perhaps the landscape itself. Nonetheless, that landscape was being graded to create the new town, and the walls around the cellar excavations seen in the photographs were being back-filled with it.
Curated by Colin Westerbeck, Director
UCR/California Museum of Photography
2009
