Lewis Baltz: The New Industrial Parks Near Irvine, California

In the late 1960s and early ‘70s Lewis Baltz became fascinated by the stark, repellent, manmade landscape that was rolling over California’s then still agrarian terrain. Baltz made a number of projects on this subject, the best known of which, The new Industrial Parks near Irvine, California, was first published in 1974. With this book Baltz took his place near the center of the New Topographics movement, a newly coined term emblematic of a cool, distanced, yet critical view of the emerging man-altered landscape. The Topographic position, detached and glacial, has since influenced photographic practice in the United States, Germany and Japan.

A lot of people liked albums, family snapshots, but I never did. I liked the photographs in Real Estate office windows, which are technically correct and heartbreakingly empty. Lewis Baltz