Lewis Baltz, whose austere, monochrome images of suburban development helped to redefine American landscape photography in the early 1970s, has died of complications of cancer and emphysema, aged 69. Baltz was one of a group of photographers whose shared aesthetic – minimalist, detached, dispassionate – drew on contemporary art practice and rejected the romanticism of traditional landscape photography. It became known as the New Topographics movement. Its subject was the impact of the city on the American wilderness, and the increasing homogenisation of the suburbs.
The photographers came together for an influential exhibition, New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape, at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, in 1975. Its curator, William Jenkins, noted their “stylistic anonymity”, linking it to the detached point of view employed by Ed Ruscha in his photobooks, Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1962) and Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966).
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