8 Quotes by Lewis Baltz

I never had any ambition to do anything commercial, anything journalistic. I wanted to be an artist, and I wanted to be an artist whose work was done in the medium of photography. It may be debatable to this day whether I ever succeeded in achieving that ambition, but the point is, I never had any uncertainty about that.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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