The New Industrial Parks near Irvine, California, 1974

In The New Industrial Parks near Irvine, California, a series of desolate, yet elegantly minimalist black-and-white photographs of postindustrial sprawl in Southern California, Baltz took a conceptual and critical approach to depicting the urban environment. The documentary-style images depict the development of barren landscapes into industrial complexes, highlighting construction details such as piles of dirt and markings on partially painted walls. Privileging neutrality over sentimentality and style, these photographs are also noticeably devoid of humans—an attempt to remove the photographer’s presence from the image. This stark, objective approach aligned Baltz with the New Topographics movement of the 1970s, which radically rejected photography’s history of idealized, untouched natural landscapes in favor of built environments.