IP3: Industrial structure during painting, Irvine,

1974

In 1974, with the portfolio The New Industrial Parks Near Irvine, California, Baltz documented how the agricultural countryside of Southern California was being replaced by manmade structures, construction sites, and industrial parks. In 1975 images from the portfolio were shown at the International Museum of Photography at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, as part of the groundbreaking exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape, helping to launch the New Topographies movement. The ten young photographers in the exhibition recorded the effects of urbanization, commerce, and manufacture on the postwar environment. While reveling in the beauty of the banal, photographs such as this one also reflected a cultural unease about the erosion of the natural landscape.