What is it about certain photographers and walls? The more banal and suburban, or decrepit and entropic the surfaces, the better, it would seem. In the interest of full disclosure, let me state up front that in the past I have spent significant time as a card carrying member of this group, as unflattering as it may be to publicly admit such a thing. I once heard a museum director dismiss this kind of photography as being trivial — a topic only an amateur with no access to interesting subject matter would undertake. Fair enough, I suppose.
Is it just that the painters got there several decades earlier and did a generally better job of covering the basic concepts? Maybe so. But, then, what about artists like Lewis Baltz? Was his work only of interest as an extension of landscape photography -- with no interesting formal content? Is there nothing left to discover in such photographic explorations? Perhaps the landscape hasn’t changed enough since the 1970’s to justify a reexamination of some of these ideas. I’m a bit skeptical of that, is all.
