Quotes by
Lewis Baltz

I hope that these photographs are sterile, that there's no emotional content.

So I think the most engaging legal struggle of the next twenty or thirty years will be to just to see where these rights of property begin and end. I assume that once something goes on the internet... it belongs to everybody.

If you read what, say, Weston was writing in the 1920s he talked about an industrial medium, reflective surfaces, contemporary subject matter—it’s a straighter line to [Ed] Ruscha’s 26 Gas Stations than it would ever be to Ansel Adam’s pictures of Yosemite and their kitschy calendar sensibility.

...you don’t put an object in a museum because it’s beautiful; an object is beautiful because you put it in a museum. Everything is photogenic once it has been photographed.

I was living in Monterey, a place where the classic photographers—the Westons, Wynn Bullock and Ansel Adams—came for a privileged view of nature. But my daily life very rarely took me to Point Lobos or Yosemite; it took me to shopping centers, and gas stations and all the other unhealthy growth that flourished beside the highway. It was a landscape that no one else had much interest in looking at. Other than me.

The world was already in the condition of art, waiting to be noticed as such. As Robert Irwin famously said, “I feel like a man sitting beside a river selling water.”

I used photography to distance myself from a world that I loathed and was powerless to improve.

Art schools, it seems to me, can be pretty great places. If you do nothing more than hang out a sign saying ‘Art School’ a lot of interesting, creative people will start coming through the door.

Photographs no longer provoke a meditation upon external phenomena, but on the conditions of their own existence.

Single frames in films don’t really work... whereas single-frame photographs are made that way.

..photographs, taken individually, have very limited powers to define the world.

The successful mission of photography was to deliver the world and all its contents into the category of the picturesque. None of which has anything to do with art.

Coming from Orange County… I was trying to find a vocabulary to mediate my sense of unspeakable horror at being born when and where I was.

I thought art was a noble profession, because it was one of the few things one did in the world that was done for its own sake, and not for an ulterior motive.

I saw a world that was being shoved down my throat, and I thought by putting up a mirror to it I could show it to itself.

I think being a photographer is a little like being a whore: if you’re really really good at it, nobody will call you that.

I never had any profound loyalty to the idea of photography as a medium but simply as the most efficient way of making or recording an image. And that has changed over the last few years. Now the most efficient way is to work with digital or with digital-analogue or between the two. Eventually, I’m sure it will be entirely digital. It’s simply the prevailing technology, the available technology now. I think in the future we won’t even have a choice.

I wanted [my photography] to appear as though the camera was seeing by itself.

The ideal photographic document would appear to be without author or art.

I assumed from the outset that photography was already art, and that I and other people working in photography were artists. I understand now that this was a minority point of view.

…the questioning of the photograph in its relation to the reality, the interrogation of representation, the famous crisis of representation, really all took place before digital technology. Digital technology, you see, is not the villain here.

It might be more useful, if not necessarily more true, to think of photography as a narrow, deep area between the novel and film.

At that time a lot of the world was oddly obscene to photography—that is it couldn’t be portrayed… There seemed to be a horror of facing the environment that we’d made for ourselves. I felt, “Okay, this is the hand that you’ve dealt me—these are the fruits of mid-period American capitalism that you’ve given us. Well, look at them.

I believed it was necessary to investigate photography, dismantle it, jettison all the non-essential components, and begin again with a stripped down but more powerful idea of what is, or could be “photographic.”

It was almost a taboo to photograph the ordinary daily existence around you, all the things that would eventually also become clichés of photography.

I never did [understand L.A.], really: I always believed that God would destroy L.A. for its sins. Finally I realized that He had already destroyed it, and then left it around as a warning.

While one image may be more interesting or appealing than another, each photograph is of equal importance and requires the context of the entire body of work to make its meaning fully understood. Like scenes from a film, the individual photograph, when removed from the series, is a fragment.

[Mixed-media photography] was genuinely an attempt to take photography beyond the physical limitations of the unaltered photographic print and enhance it with the plasticity, object-hood and visual surface of the other graphic arts. This work failed to gain wide acceptance outside the academic world... the complexity of the fracture usually took precedent over the nominal content of the work.

We grew up in a world of images. So the veneration once given to an image is gone.

I hope that these photographs are sterile, that there’s no emotional content.

I didn’t like the world of photography. I didn’t like the culture of photography. I feel the same way today. (2011)

The intellectual or imaginative engagement of the viewer is what makes the work finally a work.