“ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT PHOTOBOOKS OF THE LATE 20TH CENTURY”

BALTZ, Lewis. Park City. Albuquerque: Artspace and New York: Castelli Graphics, (1980). Oblong quarto, original light brown cloth, original photographic dust jacket. $2300.

First edition of the scarce second photobook in Baltz’s New Topographics trilogy—“a key moment in Baltz’s oeuvre” (Parr & Badger)—inscribed on the title page, “For Debra with best regards, Lewis Baltz, 8.5.82,” with 102 finely screened black-and-white photogravure plates.

"Lewis Baltz's Park City is the second in a loose 'trilogy' of photobooks that began with New Industrial Parks Near Irvine California (1974) and finished with San Quentin Point (1986)… Baltz's photographs… are exemplary. They are shot in the cool, elevational style that is the American counterpart to the Bechers in Europe. But Baltz's objectivity transcends itself, registering a magnified intensity that turns objectivity into impersonal subjectivity. Park City marks a key moment in Baltz's oeuvre, when he brought his conceptual instincts fully to the fore… Rigorous, passionate, fiercely intelligent, Park City is one of the most important photobooks of the late 20th century" (Parr & Badger II:34). "Baltz's black-and-white prints… have an austere beauty" (New York Times). Scarce first edition, one of 3000 copies in the second volume of Baltz's trilogy of "succinct and deftly designed publications" (Roth, 228), printed by Leo Castelli, whose gallery gave Baltz his first solo show in 1971. With text by Gus Blaisdell. See Open Book, 298.

Book fine, light edge-wear to near-fine dust jacket. A seminal photobook of the 20th century, scarce inscribed.