Candlestick Point

The images in his 1989 series Candlestick Point show fallow Californian land, where piles of rubble and waste accumulate in the middle of the prairie. Traces of technical land development--drainage channels and water dams--are visible, becoming a typically American theme: the development of a territory in the almost infinite prairie. Baltz's photographic record of the development at Candlestick Point combines sociological and analytical rigor and is strongly oriented towards the tradition of Land art, and retrospectively pays tribute to its crucial influence on conceptual art since the 1970s.