Tract House No 22

Tract housing refers to identical homes built on land divided into small plots. They’re easy to design and cheap to build. For his series The Tract Houses (1969–71), Lewis Baltz flattened angles and perspective to highlight the lack of humanity and grace in the design of such houses. All photographs: Lewis Baltz Trust

South Corner, Parking Area, 23831 El Toro Road, El Toro

In his 1974 series, The New Industrial Parks Near Irvine, California, Baltz reduced facades to geometrically abstract shapes by stripping away their sense of space

Construction Detail, East Wall, Xerox, 1821 Dyer Road, Santa Ana

Baltz’s facades tell you nothing about the content or function such structures might have. As he once put it: ‘You couldn’t tell if they were making pantyhose or mega-death’

From the series Maryland, 1976

The Corcoran Gallery in Washington DC commissioned Baltz to document the capital city for the US bicentennial. He found its monuments and official architecture uninteresting, instead shooting the Maryland suburbs where many government staff lived. The bland scenes he captured look so generic, they could have been from anywhere in America

Prospector Park, Subdivision Phase III, Lot 123, Looking North

Park City, an elaborate series from the late 70s, follows a huge building project for a garden city and dormitory town 28 miles from Salt Lake City, Utah. Baltz said this kind of project, built on the contaminated ground of a former silver-mining town, was conceived solely for profit, not people

Interior, 1, Park City

The neatness and regularity of a Park City interior is juxtaposed with an unruly mound – both the consequences of construction. As the series progresses, such piles take centre stage, misty and sublime in the morning, sunbaked and ashen in the midday light – poking out from behind queues of homes or filling the whole scene like man-made mountain ranges

Interior, 33, Park City

Baltz’s photographs of the Park City interiors are full of ambiguity: it is impossible to tell whether the structures are being erected or destroyed

From Generic Night Cities (and Others), 1988–2000

The photographs in the photographer’s Generic Night Cities series include car parks, traffic lanes and street signs. Devoid of distinct buildings or recognisable landmarks, they were exhibited as prints up to two metres wide, and present cities as places without perspective or direction

Piazza Pugliese, 1992 – from the series Italian Night Color Work

Baltz taught photography in Switzerland for the last decade of his life. ‘Among the qualities that most attracted me to photography were its transparency (illusory, of course) and its (equally illusory) sense of being almost authorless,’ he said. ‘The vernacular that interested me wasn’t the “snapshot aesthetic” but the commercial photograph in a “documentary” style – the sort you might see in a real-estate office window: high-resolution, artless, and very distancing.’ Lewis Baltz, a photobook retrospective, is published by Steidl