Lewis Baltz Quotes

#1. I wanted [my photography] to appear as though the camera was seeing by itself.

Lewis Baltz

#2. The ideal photographic document would appear to be without author or art.

Lewis Baltz

#3. I used photography to distance myself from a world that I loathed and was powerless to improve.

Lewis Baltz

#4. I believed it was necessary to investigate photography, dismantle it, jettison all the non-essential components, and begin again with a stripped down but more powerful idea of what is, or could be photographic.

Lewis Baltz

#5. It might be more useful, if not necessarily more true, to think of photography as a narrow, deep area between the novel and film.

Lewis Baltz

#6. I assumed from the outset that photography was already art, and that I and other people working in photography were artists. I understand now that this was a minority point of view.

Lewis Baltz

#7. The photobook occupies that deep area between the novel and the film.

Lewis Baltz

#8. Anyone can take pictures. What's difficult is thinking about them, organizing them, and trying to use them in some way so that some meaning can be constructed out of them. That's really where the work of the artist begins.

Lewis Baltz