Many of the photographers associated with new topographics  were inspired by the man-made. Parking lots, suburban housing and warehouses were all depicted with a beautiful stark harshness, almost in the way early photographers documented the natural landscape. These photographers included Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Frank Gohlke, Nicholas Nixon, Joe Deal, Henry Wessel and Stephen Short and have influenced photographic practices regarding landscape around the world

Robert Adamas pointed his camera at eerily empty streets, pristine trailer parks and the steady creep of suburban development in all its regulated uniformity.

All the pictures had a similar banal aesthetic, in that they were formal, mostly black and white prints of the urban landscape

-Lewis Baltz made stark photographs of the walls of office buildings and warehouses on industrial sites in Orange County.

“New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape” was an exhibition that epitomized a key moment in American landscape photography. The exhibition was at the International Museum of Photography at the George Eastman House, New York, and remained open to the public from October 1975 until February 1976 featuring photographers showing the growing unease about how the natural landscape was being eroded by industrial development.  In one way, they were photographing against the tradition of nature photography that the likes of Ansel Adams and Edward Weston had created.

Each photographer in the New Topographics exhibition was represented by 10 prints. All but Stephen Shore worked in black and white. It seemed to heighten the sense of detachment in Shore’s photographs of anonymous intersections and streets.

-Nixon concentrated on innercity development: skyscrapers that dwarfed period buildings, freeways and gridded streets