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