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Show New Book Portrays 'Skeptical Landscapes, Deceives Readers' -;l.JjJv.vJ.:'.!.';:-.... j.;! hiujiiji iu '.mi ium n i . n m n i i n i i , , View of Prospector Square by Lewis Baltz is on the book jacket of "Park City". s Park City Skeptical Landscapes Photographs by Lewis Baltz Text by Gus Blaisdell Artspace Press, Castclli Graphics, Aperture, Inc. $75.00 By Max Jarman There is always a flurry of excitement when a new book dealing with Park City rolls off the press. There is so little available on the subject that each new publication about our city is rapidly snatched up by interested readers, soon becoming out of print and hard to find. Readers advertise unsuccessfully unsuc-cessfully for copies of Fraser Buck and George Thompson's Thomp-son's "Treasure Mountain Home", scour used book stores for Joe McPhee's "Trail of the Leprechaun' and happily pay $8.00 for the only available publication on the subject. -'Diggings and Doings in Park f City" by Rave Ringholz. the latest. "Park City"; by Lewis Baltz and Gus Blaisdell, was released only this week and will probably never be seen as an integral addition to personal libraries of Park City literature. Rather, the expensive ($75) "coffee table" book seems destined locally to become a status symbol and conversation conversa-tion piece. Without first paying careful care-ful attention to the stark, crisp black and white photograph photo-graph on the book jacket, Park City readers may find the handsomely bound volume vol-ume deceiving. There are no tales of the Silver Queen, rich ore strikes, saloons, brothels, or of depression years and hard times. There are no pictures of mines, miners. Main Street during l he "aav nineties", or of the great fire of 1898. Lewis Bait and Gus Blaisedclf s "Park City" is a photographic essay of the present and future, yet it contains none of the customary cus-tomary slick color prints of waist deep powder against deep blue skies. There are no lush green hillsides backdropping even greener golf courses and certainly no initmate scenes of candlelight candle-light dining in opulant settings. Instead, well-known modern photographer Lewis Baltz captures through his lens the hideousness of large scale development in the city's most unattractive setting. set-ting. There arc 102 black and white plates in the volume chronicling the Prospector Pros-pector Park Village and Square developments during the building boom of 1978 and 1979. Mr. Baltz is a master of available light black and white photography remini-cent remini-cent of the style of Ansel Adams. His high contract prints are sharp, defined, even to the point of being harsh. His treatment of the spectrum of shades from black to white is masterful and the rough textures created by his images invoke feeling and emotion. Baltz exhibits a bizzare sense of depravity in his composition, almost similar to the work of Diane Arbus. Unlike Arbus, Baltz does not deal with the depravity of humans but with what they create. Baltz is a photographer photo-grapher of landscapes al-ered al-ered unsympathetically by the hands of man. If there is message, meaning and symbolism sym-bolism to Baltz's "Park City", it is that of altered landscapes or in the words of Gus Blaisdell, who wrote the volumes miniscule amount of supcrflous text: "skeptical, landscanos". In his attempt to make a statement of the urbanization urbaniza-tion of the American West. Mr. Baltz has indeed found the right town, but he has narrowed his scope unjustly 10 create a totally false impression of Park Citv. Although his images are clearly of Park City landscapes, land-scapes, his mind is evidently in the energy rich boom towns of Rock Springs or Green River, Wyoming. It is as if the photographer had intended to capture the totally uncontrolled dcvelop- ment and growth of those areas but found the accomodations accomo-dations in Park City more pleasant. In Park City, Baltz found the -sheer ugliness of growth while at the sarne time the comfort of resort living. To . make his statement, the photographer chose the Prospector area with its white lifeless tailings littered with the remnants of previous pre-vious mining operations. On the cover. Baltz captures cap-tures what Balisdell terms "ski sprawl" with a panorama pano-rama from the old city dump. The image shows Park Meadows under construction in the distance with Prospector Prospec-tor Square sitting lifeless in the foreground. The bizarre scene is of the stark white soil at Prospector contrasting with the black asphalt shapes of newly paved parking lots. The lois contain no vehicles and there arc no buildings which they could conceivably serve. The next fifteen or so plates are of the foreboding soil of Prospector, littered with concrete slabs, chunks of rusty iron and other debris. There is nothing attractive about mounds of earth churned up in preparation for building, and there is nothing attractive about the photographs. As the reader progresses, houses begin to spring up in the harsh setting and the litter which rises in the process adds to that of the past to make the image even more unappetizing. Burning bargabc piles give off seemingly seem-ingly poisonous gasses and plywood is everywhere. Finally, the photographer turns his attention to interiors inter-iors of the newly constructed houses. Gus Blaisdell interprets the images as "low-cost materials at high prices". There are scenes of debris-ridden floors, bare studes. dangling conduit and wires, and the ever-present fireplaces. Contrasting the warm cozy image of the western hearth exuding hospitality hos-pitality and ncighborliness, Baltz focuses on pre-fab. black metal units agains! stark white shectrock walls. His fireplaces arc stark, mechanical and almost repugnant. re-pugnant. His bathrooms are treated similarily - cold tiny spaces which Blaisdell in his text likens to "gas chambers.". cham-bers.". The text found at the rear of the book is largely esoteric and difficult to read or understand. One section on Park City constantly com pares Park City to Los Angeles and forecasts our community as the first to be confronted with "ski sprawl", a new form of urban blight. In another more lurid paragraph, Blaisdell Blais-dell writes "One's first impression on seeing these subdivisions was that if gas stations had imaginations, then these would be the places their children would honeymoon". In short, the publication defies interpretation and must be seen to be believed. The title is extremely deceptive decep-tive in that the book is not "Park City": it is a tiny microism of the community narrowed in perspective to suit the abstract, depraved needs of the photographer. However, the camera lens docs not lie: it is only the photographer using it to portray a half truth. The images are real, too real, and they present a blow to our perceived idylic lifestyle. Finally, the book is partially par-tially funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the arts, and judging by its contents, one must wonder if the citizen's tax dollars were well and justifiably spent on this project. Fortunately the volume's high price ($75) may keep its damaging effects to Park City at a minimum. |