Topographic Photography

About

Topographic photography borrows the plain, descriptive manner of survey work. Its roots lie in the government expeditions of the 1860s and 1870s in the American West, when Timothy O'Sullivan and William Henry Jackson recorded terrain for geological surveys. In 1975 the exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape at George Eastman House in Rochester turned that cool approach on new suburbs, warehouses and highways.

Joe Deal looked down on subdivisions from high vantage points; Lewis Baltz recorded the blank walls of California industrial parks; Stephen Shore, the only colour photographer in the show, described Main Streets and parking lots. Frank Gohlke photographed grain elevators and later landscapes after disaster. In Britain, Jem Southam has spent years returning to the same rivers, coasts and ponds to register slow change. Look for level horizons, flat midday light and a refusal to prefer the picturesque over the ordinary.