CategoriesStyles and Movements
New Topographics
Landscape photography of the 1970s that recorded suburbs, industrial parks and roadside buildings in a deliberately plain, neutral style.
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About
By the early 1970s the heroic wilderness views of Ansel Adams seemed out of step with a country of freeways and subdivisions. A group of photographers answered with pictures of what had been built: tract houses on bulldozed hills, windowless warehouses, mobile homes, freshly graded lots. The images look neutral, with level horizons, flat light and frontal viewpoints, borrowing the plain record of 19th-century survey photography and the deadpan of Ed Ruscha's Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1963).
The name comes from New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape, a show William Jenkins organised at George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, in 1975. It brought together Robert Adams, whose The New West (1974) surveyed Colorado's spreading suburbs, Lewis Baltz, Joe Deal, Frank Gohlke, Nicholas Nixon, Stephen Shore, Henry Wessel and the German couple Bernd and Hilla Becher, whose typologies of water towers and blast furnaces shaped their students in Düsseldorf.
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