ART : A Photographer Who Deals in Plain Images of the Industrial World

There is something bizarrely appropriate about interviewing photographer Lewis Baltz at an Irvine cafe that consists of four tables facing a parking lot.

Baltz, 44, is known in international art circles for his crisp, deliberately unremarkable images of construction sites, tract houses and industrial parks. He is not a photographer in the traditional sense of capturing moments of exceptional beauty, power or surprise. Rather, his work is motivated by dual interests--in the powers and limits of photography itself and in the way that late 20th-Century industrialism has changed the meaning of landscape.

The morning after his recent lecture at the Irvine Fine Arts Center, Baltz--who shuttles between homes in Sausalito and Milan, Italy--cuts a cosmopolitan figure. Attired in a crisp white shirt, jeans and safari jacket, lighting cigarettes in a steady stream, he cradles his far-ranging thoughts in a warmly urbane baritone.

In fact, Baltz is a native son: He was born and grew up in Newport Beach. A clever child, he discovered photography at 11 and promptly lost interest in academic matters. (“I only avoided flunking out of Newport Harbor High School because they wouldn’t flunk anybody.”) He became a habitue of Ferris Gallery--the legendary Los Angeles venue for contemporary art--and gawked at the first L.A. show of Andy Warhol’s work.

“I was sure this was the sort of thing my parents would despise; therefore there had to be some real value to it,” he recalls. “This was one of the most alienating environments to grow up in that I can imagine. I remember the social atmosphere that was so intensely felt here: the Cold War, McCarthyism. . . . It was that general madness of Americans at that period, focused very intensely here because of the conservative politics.

“But also there was this sense of explosive change. Everything was being torn down. . . . The material culture was shifting very rapidly. And, of course, with that comes a real apocalyptic sensibility.

“I never could put my finger on that until I came back to Los Angeles after having been in Milan. And I thought, what was so comforting about living in Italy? The Italians, the food, all that, yes. But there was something I found very comforting about walking through a 17th-Century city, walking through a cathedral that was a kind of Romanesque wedding cake. . . . (Such sights) were monuments to the durability of human endeavor.

“We say (the redwoods) are our cathedrals. I used to believe that, but I never really felt it. And I realized why: Because those things are absolutely independent of human existence. It’s like making a personal theology based on the perfection of the galaxy and finding comfort in that. I think many people could, but it’s not cultural.

“To climb a hill and see a beautiful redwood tree is not the same as to climb a hill and see the ruins of a 5th-Century temple. Nothing remotely to do with us had anything to do with (the redwood). Its back is turned to us forever. We can regard it or not.

“As soon as I came back to Los Angeles, I began to have these apocalyptic fantasies and dreams. They seemed perfectly logical. I didn’t see (Ridley Scott’s futuristic film) ‘Blade Runner’ as entertainment; I saw it as prophecy. It gave me a vision of California and also a way of making peace with it. . . . ‘Blade Runner’ is our destiny.

“The idea that everything was built yesterday carries with it the implication that it could be destroyed this afternoon. There’s nothing you can hold onto.

“There is also the self-absorption, the sense of being in a hall of mirrors. We don’t have so much to reflect back except ourselves. This is our architecture, this is our period, our sensibility. It’s very much us . . . . “

“We went from bean fields at a flood plain of the Santa Ana River to this very complex society that has been built in Irvine--complex in the sense that it is wired into global society--but in fact, there are already forces at work that will completely undo this.

“All of this highway building has, in effect, turned back on itself and become a barrier rather than a passageway. There are ecological problems. . . . The age of information processing has now become subject to an information glut. . . . That’s the social reality I perceive.”

Baltz’s photographs are not made as individual entities but as equal elements composing a series. The crisp, simply composed, black-and-white images in his earliest monographs, like “The New Industrial Parks Near Irvine, California” (1975), are like primers, spelling out “the most generic or common aspects of the environment.” Beginning with “Park City” (1981), Baltz began to consider more deeply the auxiliary changes that occur when people transform the landscape for various purposes.

“(If you) start with drywall and cement bags and end up with a house, it is a conceptually higher, more complex form of organization. But there is decay, destruction and disorganization that takes place almost immediately. The entropy machine starts as soon as the organizational machine starts. . . .

“(My) books show the disorder and physical decay of industrial products as they begin to re-merge with nature, raising the question of whether they’re natural or industrial. You experience nature in my photographs as an industrial product.”

Baltz remains an observer, however, with no interest in moralizing. This neutral outlook “alienates you from every possible political constituency,” he acknowledges. “The Right doesn’t want (the issues) looked at at all, and the Left feels it’s politically incorrect to (observe) without actually making a move to change (anything). The problem I have with that is, how would you change it, realistically? What sort of world would you propose?”

The camera offers Baltz an ideal vehicle for looking at signs of industrial change. “Photography has a very particular way of dealing with information. . . . It tells us things in a different way, if not necessarily different things.... Still photographs lift something out of the flow of time so we can examine it in a way that presumably we always could but never would.

“And because (the photograph) fixes our gaze on something normally seen as a passing vision, it alienates us from things. It reverses the poles of the familiar and the exotic . . . so we begin to have this familiarity with things we’ve never seen, but also this sense of distancing from what we do see.

“The exotic has never held much interest for me as something to work with, at least not yet. But the typical, the familiar, the so-called obvious--those are things that interest me because there’s much to them that does not meet the eye in observation.”

Baltz recently has been working on a series of photographs of the sites of high technology, because he is interested in “the perception of the phenomena of high technology: What we think it is, and what it actually looks like. When I photograph in these locations, the locations all look the same. They’re in Irvine, Silicon Valley, Marseilles, Singapore.

“They are ‘clean rooms,’ places where microchip and computer design go on. They have the same furnishings. Everything’s in English. They look crummy. They look identical. There’s nothing except a caption to tell you where these were made, which I think speaks volumes.

“And the pictures are filled with information, none of which is useful, none of which gives the slightest idea, really, of what’s going on. They are the most extreme illustrations I can think of of the difference between old and new technology.

“(Old) machine technology is a traditional photographic subject,” he said. The subjects of Paul Strand and other photographers of the 1920s and ‘30s, “are beautiful, Aristotelian machines you can kind of figure out. You can see how this (part) turns that (part), and so on. “But you can look at (new technology) and not know what it does. It’s a special kind of arcane knowledge. There’s nothing that reveals itself to observation.

“In that sense, this body of work as a procedure (for discovering new information) is doomed to fail. I like that idea. . . . In a very, very clear way (the project) becomes a treatise on the failure of photographic information. . . . I’m always fascinated to come to the end (of such a project). It’s like the end of the world.”