Lewis Baltz’s photographs show the American landscape as an occupied space, full of single-family houses in indifferent banality, full of new kinds of technoparks, which with their supercooled architecture hardly reveal any more whether harmless underwear or mega-death is being manufactured in them. The photographs tackle the edges of the urban landscape, examining American civilisation at the transition from city to nature, diving into the wasteland where nothing conceals and everything – mud, boards, bushes, rubbish – becomes the questioning image of a monstrous civilisation. His photographs present today’s post-modern world as a garish, attractive, but also painful spectacle.
In his first solo exhibition in Austria at the FOTOHOF, Lewis Baltz shows large-format nocturnal cityscapes. Urs Stahel, the director of the Fotomuseum Winterthur, remarks: “The Night Cities, single- or multi-part night cities, always large-scale, beguile with violent chiaroscuro patterns, with garish colours that stand out from the black of the night. They are a spotlight spectacle that fascinates and pleases as much as it hurts with its shrill, seductively beautiful artificiality. “Landscape” no longer as a “before us”, but as a fully commercialised urban laboratory in which we are in the midst of and which leaves few options open for the future.”