Author Description

In 1990, The New York Times critic Andy Grundberg noted of California-born photographer Lewis Baltz--who came to prominence as part of the New Topographic movement of the late 1970s--that, "Although Lewis Baltz's pictures can be as dry as the desert and no more inviting, he is capable of making photographs of rare sublimity." Nevada is a project made with the assistance of the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation in 1977, which marked Baltz' initial interest in the "empty quarter"--America's intermountain West. Nevada, until recently, was the West's (and perhaps America's) most overlooked state, a nearly unpopulated wasteland of gambling and nuclear testing. In this succinct work, Baltz uses the sunny emptiness of the Nevada landscape as a metaphor for human isolation and solitude. This volume includes a text by former Los Angeles County Museum of Art curator of photography, Robert Sobieszek. Lewis Baltz's work is characterized by a dispassionate gaze that seeks desolation and forgotten places in order to examine the post-industrial landscape. He has previously published a number of influential monographs with Steidl, including The Tract Houses, The Prototype Works and The New Industrial Parks Near Irvine, California--all of which are now available in a slip-cased edition.