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First edition, first printing. Signed in black ink on the title page by Baltz (signed at the Galerie Thomas Zander in Cologne). Hardcover. Fine cloth, with photographically illustrated dust jacket. Photographs by Lewis Baltz. Essay by Gus Blaisdell (in English). Designed by Jack W. Stauffacher. 246 pp. with 102 duotone plates. 10-7/8 x 11-1/4 inches. This edition was limited to 3000 hardbound copies. Out of print and rare. [Cited in Martin Parr and Gerry Badger, The Photobook: A History, Volume II. (London and New York: Phaidon, 2006). As New in Near Fine dust jacket (stray surface marks and wear to the extremities), in original publisher's shrink-wrap saved with the book; dust jacket enclosed in a removable archival Brodart cover. While Lewis Baltz is perhaps best known for his New Industrial Parks near Irvine, California series, Park City might be a better candidate as the magnum opus of the artist's early work. Not merely representative of the stylistic and conceptual framework of the photographic movement he helped to define, Park City is the single most exhaustive and far-reaching visual criticism of 1970s-era American real estate development: the book is thus the New Topographics document par excellence. The book's 102 plates (Baltz defines the Series as "a sequential work of 102 elements") first take the viewer through overall site views that set up a jarring contrast between the mountains (already carved up for the ski area) and the freshly built condominiums and houses that soon will take over the landscape. Moving through the pages, the plates begin to focus more and more on the excavation and earth moving efforts that precede building; the mounds of earth, littered with construction debris, are but pitiful doubles of the mountains in the background. As Baltz takes us closer in, we can begin to discern the buildings themselves: dreadful echoes of The Tract Houses clumped together and rising ostentatiously from the once verdant valley floor. A little over halfway into the book, we're brought inside the still-under-construction homes, where images of more debris mingle with dingy interior views that invoke claustrophobia rather than inviting living spaces. A fireplace wall covered with a vapor barrier, too-small windows, miles of wood studs and endless drywall combine to suggest an oppressive blandness. By the time one arrives at the book's final plate, a feeling of pity for the eventual inhabitants of these spaces begins to emerge. And in the final image, we see just how many of these properties have been sold on a map dotted with push pins of varying colors, indicating the status of each lot in the subdivision. Recalling the book's first plate, a distant view of the landscape dotted with structures, this map is a satisfying final image, in that it represents the complete transformation of the landscape into an abstract, flat object--not unlike Baltz's photographs themselves. The centerpiece of a loosely conceived trilogy that began with the New Industrial Parks and ended with San Quentin Point, Park City embodies the best, most incisive and considered qualities of both, and stands as the finest publication by one of the most important of contemporary artists. In his philosophical essay on the work of Lewis Baltz, Gus Blaisdell rigorously examines the very nature of photography and its relationship to the physical world. Blaisdell systematically unclutters and demystifies previous attempts at understanding photographs of the real world, representation and perception, stripping bare all "gobbledegook" and "rigamarole" of various intellectual stabs. and he does it in a way that invites the reader along on his mind-bending ride. That's Gus. No critical writer comes close. The essay is essential reading for anyone seriously interested in photography. From the publisher: "During 1978 and 1979 Lewis Baltz, one of America's foremost contemporary photographers, undertook to document the building of a rapidly growing ski resor.
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