Lot #81, Prospector Village, Looking Southeast 1978

Lewis Baltz made this photograph, Lot #81, Prospector Village, Looking Southeast, with a camera and film, catching a view that is almost a non-view. The gray scale flattens everything out, so it feels kind of like a drawing, a study, an inventory of shapes. Look at how the surface texture of the land fills the frame. It’s not about deep space, but about how the light falls on every bit of dirt and gravel, those parallel lines from the tires cutting through the dirt - it’s almost like brushstrokes. The horizon line is really high, and this means the eye is drawn down into the gritty foreground. There’s a stack of lumber in the corner, and I feel Baltz wants us to examine the different shades of gray in these materials - mountains, sky, houses, and wood. Baltz reminds me of Ed Ruscha, another artist who looks at banal, overlooked parts of the American landscape. They both ask us to notice the strange beauty in the everyday, and to question what we consider worthy of our attention. It’s about finding poetry in plain sight.