Lewis Baltz: Nevada 1977

This project has been postponed by the publisher and is due in August 2010.

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.