Lewis Baltz died yesterday, November 22, 1914. It was terrible news to me. He’d just turned 69. This interview may have been his last; it’s certainly the most comprehensive that I know of. I met Lewis at an after-opening party in Paris about 18 years ago, where we’d both established residency. We became friends, but he was never one to talk about himself or his work, which I admired. Mostly we discussed art, books, politics, living in Paris, topical subjects of the day. He’s a voracious, intelligent reader, and we regularly exchanged books in a roughly three to one ratio, his to mine. The first time we talked about his work was in the summer of 2000 when he asked me to write the Phaidon 55 monograph on his work, which came out soon after. I’d seen his work in the early 1980s at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York City, where I then lived—stark, intense black-and-white photographs, which I loved, and still do. His color works maintained a similar intensity, with more of a sociopolitical critique informing them. Here he talks about it all: growing up in newly evolving Republican Southern California; taking up photography at 12; being inspired by Edward Weston; the Sixties; The New Topographics; a shift to color in the 1980s; art and technology; Europe; and his recent museum retrospectives. I will miss him and was lucky enough to have had these conversations.
— Jeff Rian
Paris November 23, 2014
