Lewis Baltz
[Photographer, b. 1945, Newport Beach, California, d. 2014, Paris.]
I was living in Monterey, a place where the classic photographers—the Westons, Wynn Bullock and Ansel Adams—came for a privileged view of nature. But my daily life very rarely took me to Point Lobos or Yosemite; it took me to shopping centers, and gas stations and all the other unhealthy growth that flourished beside the highway. It was a landscape that no one else had much interest in looking at. Other than me.
Robert Adams
[Photographer and writer, b. 1937, Orange, New Jersey, lives in Astoria, Oregon.]
Many have asked, pointing incredulously toward a sweep of tract homes and billboards, why picture that? The question sounds simple, but it implies a difficult issue—why open our eyes anywhere but in undamaged places like national parks?
Scenic grandeur is today sometimes painful. The beautiful places to which we journey for inspiration surprise us by the melancholy they can induce... Unspoiled places sadden us because they are, in an important sense, no longer true.
John Szarkowski
[Curator, critic, historian, and photographer, b. 1925, Ashland, Wisconsin, d. 2007, Pittsfield, Massachusetts.]
To photograph beautifully a choice vestigial remnant of natural landscape is not necessarily to do a great favor to its future.... It is difficult today for an ambitious young photographer to photograph a pristine snowcapped mountain without including the parking lot in the foreground as a self-protecting note of irony.
Robert Adams
[Photographer and writer, b. 1937, Orange, New Jersey, lives in Astoria, Oregon.]
What a landscape photographer traditionally tries to do is show what is past, present, and future at once. You want ghosts and the daily news and prophecy... It’s presumptuous and ridiculous. You fail all the time.
Ansel Adams
[Photographer, b. 1902, San Francisco, d. 1984, Carmel, California.]
Landscape photography is the supreme test of the photographer—and often the supreme disappointment.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
[Photographer and painter, b. 1908, Chanteloup, France, d. 2004, Paris.]
The world is going to pieces and people like Adams and Weston are photographing rocks!
(1930s)
Lewis Baltz
[Photographer, b. 1945, Newport Beach, California, d. 2014, Paris.]
In my research, my interest has always been with the phenomenal margin, those areas that are not quite landscape, not quite visible, the marginally taboo, the nearly obscene.
