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 has been shown in about fifty solo exhibitions and featured in seventeen monographs. It now forms part of the permanent collections of the Guggenheim Museum, 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.