Baltz

rochester

Two ply matting

• seires of horizontal constructions, even in the most vertical shots

• piling up of flat picture planes

• often printed v dark

• plast x with two trees and grey pillars

• south wall plast x 350 costa mesa

• exquisite printing,

  • north wall master speicalist company 1640 monovria costa mesa

  • wet wall

  • and a strip of windows,

  • two long, one slightly shorter with white curtains, and one smaller with a grey window, and then a black window half covered by a white shade

• construction detail, east wall, xerox, 1821 dryer road santa anna

  • far left a wall with three shades of grey and half painted

  • the grey transitions into a concrete wall

  • foreground of cinder blocks (andre?)

  • large wall

  • fire escape

  • photographic historical

sand dunes

• ruscha

some of the windows have reflections, of palm trees and the like, reminiscent of stnd landscapes, but the best ones are the ones that have no back ground, no reflection, heavily minimal

smack in the middle of a composition that features a sqaure on a rectangle, two slightly oblong circles, furniture show room, mod couch in black leather and white plastic, reflection of gas stations—pure compostion on the outside, less pureo n the inside ; only depiction of a person is in one reflection, on the inside of a tract home, with a palm tree and a poster of a woman, my second favourite foto of a califonrian palm tree, after adams

has this much care been taken to shoot parking lines the difference b/w spray paint and non, b/w those done carefully and those scattered, the odd cornos of paint in the sprayed lines is weirdly the only chaotic touch

other perfect examples of form

two doors with vertical lines inset in a dark grey almost black cinderblock wall, the cinderblock wall a grid

a vertical white ramp, abuting a white wall, adjacent to a black door with clear vertical liens, above three long rectangles

a full wall of breezeway brick, the only foto in this seires whose interest seems to be about patterns, about the minimal repeating of patterns rather then the rejecting of them—the argument could be made that baltz is a minimalist, or he is talking in the language of late 70s minimalism, but the interest in patterns that are oblique, interupted, do not exist in the traditional ways, suggests that though he may not be an ironist, he was working against fine art patterning in work outside of photographic practice

language of sublimity

what is unusal or remarkable is placed outside the context, for example one of two greyed out doors straight in the middle of the composition against the rule of thirds, a snaller door with a grid on the far left, and on the right, a triple circles, half out of the frame

or one that has a collection of rubber pilled pell mell but we only see a spare inch of it

grey on grey, black on black, white on white

vertical grey band about 6/10^th of thee way up, with a fire escape bisecting it near the edge of the frame

two bare tree

such creamy greys, sumptoousness, materiality

atget?

Compare park city 83 interoir, unfinished dry wall, window dusty, fire place with plastic stuffed in it, absent of even the remakrs of people, with the implicit colonialism of owens

a garage with two small windows, high up showign just floruscents, then a larger windows, with a car,some tools, a trampoline

question of the ironist, and aesthetic purity

should these be connected b/c they are beautiful?

Shadows and patterns of trees on walls

the trees seem so absent, spindly, and out of place, like pearls on a pig

three juniperrrs at the edge of a parking lot

assumption of emptiness, but like the circle.furniture show room one above, there is work that is extremely busy, one with two grage doors, four pillars, a electric box, a garabage conatier, a fume chimney, and 9 meters with two fuse boxes

but one with just three large black squares

little or no text:

sand dunes hand painted

raad and no addmitance on another

one with two garage doors half out of the frame and then two regualr doors, the left one labelled d, the right one c

783 milla road shipping and reciving barely visible

little or no weather

only one has a remeant of snow

little or no odd angles or artistic angles, only two on an oblique

the irony of post modernism: by not making art, one makes art