Lewis Baltz at Castelli, 1981.
Of all his books, Park City is the big one and coming across this poster for the original exhibition of the photographs at Castelli Gallery is a treat on a Saturday morning nearly 45 years later.
Leo Castelli was one of the leading gallerists for contemporary painting at the time having given Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, and Frank Stella, among others, their first one-man shows. But it was actually his wife, Antoinette, who brought Baltz to his attention. Photography as a medium had little to no credibility in the mainstream art world and while things were slowly starting to change it was Baltz's educated thinking that made him a more easy fit into the discourse at the high end.
I got to hear him present this work a year later in England in a sparsely attended seminar room at Trent Polytechnic. No-one liked it. It took a week or two before I realised he had changed my life.
