The New Industrial Parks Near Irvine, California

Lewis Baltz's The New Industrial Parks Near Irvine, California is one of the founding documents of the New Topographics movement, a body of work that gave a critical, deadpan eye to the man-altered landscape spreading across California's former agricultural land.

The book presents fifty-one uniform black-and-white photographs of suburban industrial buildings, shot in a flat, minimalist style with no evidence of human life, printed on heavy coated stock. First published by Leo Castelli/Castelli Graphics in 1974 in an edition of 960 unnumbered copies, it was designed by Thomas F. Barrow and issued alongside a related Castelli Graphics print portfolio of the same fifty-one images in an edition of forty. A separate signed limited edition of 100 hand-numbered copies, signed by Baltz, was also produced.

The work placed Baltz at the center of New Topographics, the movement named for the 1975 George Eastman House exhibition that also included Robert Adams, Stephen Shore, Henry Wessel Jr., and Bernd and Hilla Becher; its cool, glacial view of suburban development shaped landscape photography in the United States, Germany, and Japan for decades afterward.