Nevada

Nevada is Lewis Baltz's 1978 survey of the tract housing and scrubland edging Reno and Sparks, issued not as a conventional photography book but as a spare, self-published pamphlet.

Designed by David Smoak and released through Castelli Graphics in an edition of 2,000, the book collects fifteen black-and-white plates, unpaginated, staple-bound in matte grey wrappers with the title embossed on the cover. The oblong format holds daylight views of new construction alongside Baltz's long-exposure nightscapes of streetlit intersections and model homes. Castelli also distributed a related portfolio of individual prints from the same series, sold through the gallery to collectors.

Nevada extends the flat documentary approach Baltz established in The New Industrial Parks near Irvine, California (1974) and points toward the larger surveys Park City (1980) and San Quentin Point (1985). Grouped with Robert Adams and the other photographers of the 1975 New Topographics exhibition, Baltz used Nevada's speculative subdivisions to track a single subject across an expanding American landscape: land steadily reorganized by development.