Interviewer: What are the principal formal problems in your work?

Baltz: The edge. Quite literally, the major issue is the question of where to place the edge, what to include or exclude. A photograph is a five-sided flat object. In its construction those sides must be considered and referred to.

Interviewer: The fifth side?

Baltz: The frontal plane. The surface of the print acts as a reference for the space that the image occupies. The plausibility of that fictive space rests entirely upon the concern shown forthe print surface.

— from: An Interview with Lewis Baltz, Winter 1972