In the late 1960s and early '70s Lewis Baltz became fascinated by the stark, repellent, manmade landscape that was rolling over California's then still agrarian terrain. Baltz made a number of projects on this subject, the best known of which, The New Industrial Parks Near Irvine, California, was first published in 1974. With this book Baltz took his place near the center of the New Topographic movement, a newly coined term emblematic of a cool, distanced, yet critical view of the emerging man-altered landscape. The Topographic position, detached and glacial, has since influenced photographic practice in the United States, Germany and Japan.

Lewis Baltz was born in Newport Beach, California, in 1945, where he grew up. He graduated from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1969 and received a Master's degree from Claremont Graduate School in 1971. Apart from the definitive exhibition "New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape", Baltz's work was shown in about fifty solo exhibitions and featured in seventeen monographs. It now forms part of the permanent collections of the Guggenheim Museum, the Tate Modern, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, to name but a few. In 2013, Baltz donated his archive to the Getty Research Institute. He lived, taught and photographed in Europe from the mid-1980s, splitting his time between Paris and Venice. Baltz died in Paris on November 22, 2014, aged 69.