San Quentin Point, no. 3 Possibly 1982 - 1985

Lewis Baltz made this gelatin silver print, "San Quentin Point, no. 3" in classic black and white. It feels like he’s showing us something sad, a kind of overlooked corner of the world, but he isn’t pushing the drama or sentimentality, which I appreciate. I wonder if he felt a little like he was pulling back the curtain on something, revealing an unglamorous truth. It’s a strange kind of beauty, right? The composition has a painterly eye, balancing the textures of the foliage, the trash, and the water's surface. He lets the image sit without forcing a point. You can see the influence of the New Topographics movement in his work— that deadpan approach, turning the camera on the overlooked, ordinary spaces that surround us. There’s something quietly radical in that act of seeing, of paying attention to what others might ignore. It's about finding the extraordinary in the ordinary, which is what artists do!