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Lewis Baltz

Written on October 18, 2009

American Suburb X has a great interview with Lewis Baltz

Q. Nowadays most photographers seem to regard photography as the best way of recording a ‘real present’ – of course, this is part of the history of the photography. Do you think we need photographs to give us real information about our present today?

A. No, I don’t think we need that at all, any more; we already know, to the point of ennui, what the world looks like in photographs. Other than in very specialized circumstances, photography has been left behind as a descriptive medium. Of course this loss of utility renders it more available to an aesthetic reading. Since the beginning photography has insisted on its place among the fine arts, now it has arrived, though in ways and for reasons unsuspected by most of its partisans.

In becoming inutile – no longer content-driven – photography became self-reflexive, much as painting did from the time of Manet. Photographs no longer provoke a meditation upon external phenomena, but on the conditions of their own existence. Photography became Modernist at precisely the moment when Modernism faltered, and became commodified at the moment when the intellectual prestige of the commodity is at its lowest ebb. Poor photography. On the other hand, given the recent applications of technology photographs are now quite acceptable objects for the market.

Filed in: Art,Article,Interview,Photography.

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