About the San Quentin Point photographs now at the University Art Museum, Baltz has stated that "here, for the first time, [he] invites an emotional response." The place is certainly a likely enough site to provoke an "emotional response." It stretches along Highway 17 directly across from the San Quentin State Prison, one of California's largest and most violent state prisons. On the bay side, the Point commands a stunning view of the Richmond oil refineries just across the bridge. Pressing close behind the Point, a pastiche of new luxury condos clings to the quarried hillside. San Quentin Point was "one of the last undeveloped bay-front sections of Marin County." That it had remained undeveloped for so long is not surprising: the Point is a ragged and unprepossessing spit of quarry and industrial landfill covered by refuse and a poor crop of native weeds. Vulnerable to flooding, oil spills and airborne industrial aromas, it is a singularly unlikely location for luxury living. To quote an ad in the San Francisco Examiner, "Town Homes on the Marin Bayshore . . . 3 bedrooms, 2 baths, tennis court, running and bike paths, pool or jacuzzi . . . a great lifestyleÓ available from only $192,500 with conventional or balloon financing at 11-1/2% to 12-3/4%.

Baltz's San Quentin Point photographs were made just prior to groundbreaking on the site. Unlike his earlier projects, Baltz does not locate the Point in any larger physical environment, nor does he document the process of construction on the site. Instead, he focuses on small isolated patches of ground, composing nature mortes out of dried weeds, splintered packing crates, stagnant pools, broken bottles, assorted tin cans and mounds of vaguely identifiable detritus. Many of the images concentrate on a small, particularly esthetic bit of flotsam centered in the frame. In others, Baltz records the tracks of shore birds or earth-moving machinery on the mud, or the archeological evidence of charred beams, shards of ceramic pipe wrapped in wire, abstract coils of electrical conduit, or abandoned shreds of clothing. His perspective is that of a solitary scavenger poking carefully through an old dump.

Although there are interesting single images in San Quentin Point, the suite of forty-three prints seems oddly ambivalent and inconclusive. Baltz employs neither the studied neutrality of the topographer nor the meticulous verisimilitude of the archaeologist that he used in earlier work. In contrast to the machinelike precision of the earlier imagery, these prints tend to reflect a certain carelessness: they go inexplicably out of focus at the edges and maintain a predominantly muddy palette. The technique of centering the significant scrap in the frame becomes somewhat formulaic, lacking either the mystic aspirations of Richard Misrach's desert shots of the bitter humor of Greg MacGregor's post-industrial evidences.

Although Baltz intends to evoke an emotional response, he offers the viewer too little information on which to base that response. By excerpting the surface of San Quentin Point from its surrounding landmarks, Baltz creates an anonymous nowhere rather than a universal location in which to discover a "sense of the mortality of all living things." It is unfortunate, perhaps, that Baltz did not raise his glance from the ground when documenting this bleak property wedged between the last exit to San Quentin State Prison, the foul-smelling refineries across the bay, and the relentless progress of luxury living to the very last square foot of Marin County landfill. The location provides a necessary context for San Quentin Point.

A single image codifies this exhibit and provides what might have been the metaphor Baltz was looking for. In it, a huge, gooey glop of some thick, oily stuff lies half-buried in the dirt. By now, of course, it may be concealed safely beneath the wall-to-wall carpet or the tennis court where, like so much of California's landfill, it will fester until someone has reason to wonder just what might have been dumped here. Baltz intended, he says, "an interpretation that goes beyond the facts of the subject matter." Such interpretations might have been facilitated by the implied objectivity found in Baltz's earlier banal topographics.