LEWIS BALTZ (1945-2014) A portfolio entitled Park City. 1978-79. With 101 photographs (out of 102). Silver prints, the images measuring 6½x9½ inches (16.5x24.1 cm.), and the reverse, the sheets slightly larger, each with Baltz's signature, date, edition notation 20/21, and plate number in pencil on verso. 4to-sized grey clamshell box; contents loose as issued. FROM AN EDITION OF 21 + 2AP.
WITH--Lewis Baltz and Gus Blaisdell, Park City 4to, black-stamped brown cloth; photo-pictorial dust jacket, lightly worn. FIRST EDITION, WITH BALTZ'S SIGNATURE. (Albuquerque: Artspace Press; New York: Castelli Graphics; In association with Aperture, Inc.), 1980.
Provenance Castelli Graphics, 1980 Proceeds from the sale of this lot will benefit Anthology Film Archives in New York. Founded by Jonas Mekas in 1970, Anthology is a non-profit organization whose mission is to present, preserve, and promote independent, experimental, and artist-made film and video.
Gus Blaisdell's introduction to Baltz's series poetically articulates Baltz's work. "Baltz's Park City photographs can be viewed as a record of the terminal stages of individuality and isolation played out against an indifferent natural setting, the heroic landscape recycled as a recreational resource. [. . .] These photographs were made in the extraordinary harshness and clarity of Park City's high-altitude light. Edges are brittle, distant objects unobscured by atmosphere, as in a vacuum. Each object stands discrete and disassociated from its surroundings. Interiors, too, share this airlessness, suggesting claustrophobia rather than shelter. [. . .] In Park City, as in many of Blatz's earlier images, there is a continual tension between what the photographs describe and what they reveal."
