
Piazza Pugliesi, from the series "Italian Night Color Work"
<p>The European architectural views by Lewis Baltz, made around 1990, differ strikingly from the bleak landscapes that cemented his reputation in the mid-1970s, when he emerged as part of the New Topographics movement. These more recent works introduce an off-center vantage point, color, great size, and an emphatic sense of time’s passage, evident in the form of blurred taillights and other atmospheric inclusions. Motivating these changes was Baltz’s growing interest in public space as regulated by private development and governmental control: for example, the proliferation of outdoor surveillance cameras (the elevated view here mimics that seen through such devices). Piazza Pugliesi—a place that does not exist under that name but could be located in Puglia or somewhere else in Southern Italy—offers a model view of a denatured terrain.</p>
Catalogue
- Year
- 1991
- Medium
- Silver dye-bleach print
- Dimensions
- 243.9 × 127 cm (96 × 50 in.)
- Collection
- Art Institute of Chicago
- Artist
- Lewis Baltz
Artist

Photography
Lewis Baltz was an American photographer known for his systematic documentation of industrial and suburban landscapes in the American West. Working primarily in black and white, his deadpan visual approach recorded factories, vacant lots, and architectural fragments with forensic precision, eschewing narrative or sentiment. His work emerged alongside conceptual art movements of the 1970s and became foundational to the New Topographics aesthetic. Baltz's practice engaged photography as a mode of social inquiry into postwar development, sprawl, and the built environment's role in shaping contemporary experience.
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Piazza Sigmund Freud
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Piazza Sigmund Freud
1989 · Silver dye-bleach print
Untitled
1985 · Gelatin silver print, from the portfolio "San Quentin Point" (1985)
Untitled
1985 · Gelatin silver print, from the portfolio "San Quentin Point" (1985)
Record
Verified by WattsOS- Artist
- Lewis Baltz
- Year
- 1991
- Medium
- Silver dye-bleach print
- Dimensions
- 243.9 × 127 cm (96 × 50 in.)
- Watts ID
- WW-1991-097477
Source
- Collection
- Art Institute of Chicago
- Source
- aic
- Reference
- View at source
- Status
- verified





