Lewis Baltz
Fotografie
12.11. – 10.12.2006

American photographer Lewis Baltz combines several paradoxes in his work. His photographs offer glimpses into the structures of buildings and landscapes, the relationships between culture and nature, construction and destruction, and technology and human desire. In his black-and-white cycles from the 1970s and 80s, detailed views and overviews explore specific locations. The photographs, mostly arranged in wall-sized blocks, alternate between serial sequences and empty spaces, thereby intensifying the viewer’s reception. But despite all the changes in perspective and detail, which avoid a uniform photographic method, and despite the crackling precision of the images, Lewis Baltz paradoxically never allows the medium of photography to become an instrument of aestheticization or even heroization of the subject. Gus Blaisdell refers to the photographs in the “Park City” cycle (1981) as “skeptical landscapes.” . Lewis Baltz’s works are shrouded in an aloofness that contradicts the current preference for large-scale color photography with its often romanticized innocence of nature, feeding instead from the source of skepticism.
Neither in the cycles depicting culturally devastated landscapes, such as Candle Stick Point (1988) and Near Reno (1986), nor in the later cycle Sites of Technology (1989–92), presented at the Thomas Zander Gallery, can any critical rhetoric be found. With their seemingly objective documentation, these photographs create a pull in perception that can become an irritation, preventing us from falling into a celebration of these images. They remain—and this is precisely what sets them apart from others—on the threshold between committed reportage, supposed cultural criticism, and cold staring. As paradoxical as it may seem, Lewis Baltz was probably only able to capture the portraits of these American places with a simultaneous involvement and distance. There, one finds either only garbage—run over by traffic, shot up, burned, decomposed—or the fragile, raw construction elements of buildings that already reveal a projection of the former.
These places, however much they are filled with cultural remnants and memories, seem to exist in a state of cultural exteriority. And just as the philosopher Michel Foucault located the “thinking of the outside” where it “resides outside of any subjectivity” in order to enable a view of its boundaries, Lewis Baltz’s images freeze on this threshold, unfolding a void that, “as soon as one directs one’s gaze toward it, causes all immediate certainties to vanish.” The images convey an impression of objective clarity, but in no way prescribe a meaning for the depicted object. Therefore, these photographs are not traditional atmospheric landscape photography, nor are they their opposite, the conceptual iconographic series of consumer or industrial facilities, some ironic (Ed Ruscha), some objectivist (Bernd and Hilla Becher).

Curated by Klaus Becké.