Baltz, 2025

Lewis Baltz's monochromatic photographs of suburban development helped to redefine American landscape photography in the early 1970s. His minimalist aesthetics, combined with his writings, helped define the New Topographics movement that rejected the romanticism of traditional landscape photography. His best-known work, The New Industrial Parks Near Irvine, California (1974), consisted of monochromatic photographic images that depicted industrial buildings, storage units, and other various suburban fixtures that helped define the Southern California landscape of that era. The fifty-one pieces in this series are a conceptual journey through an urban landscape that virtually went unnoticed and helped change our cultural perspective of how to define what a landscape is in today's modern society. 

Five decades later, Crawford revisited all 51 Baltz locations, documenting the changes that had taken place in this ever-changing urban California environment. Crawford approached this reinterpretation in a completely different manner by using his interest in masked geometric shapes, as we saw in his earlier works from the Umbra and the Chroma series. These photographic images continue to reflect Crawford's painterly roots inspired by two of California’s hard-edge painters, Karl Benjamin and John McLaughlin. His experimentations add a new dimension to this ongoing contextual dialogue that uses photography as a basis for conceptual thinking. These landscape images—abstracted through the use of masked geometric shapes formed by color filters on photographic paper—showcase Crawford’s unique pioneering approach, developed in the mid-1970s and only now receiving due recognition.