New topographics was a term coined by William Jenkins in 1975 to describe a group of American photographers such as Robert Adams and Lewis Baltz whose pictures had a similar banal aesthetic, in that they were formal, mostly black and white prints of the urban landscape.
Many of the photographers associated with new topographics including Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Nicholas Nixon and Bernd and Hiller Becher, were inspired by the man-made, selecting subject matter that was matter-of-fact. Parking lots, suburban housing and warehouses were all depicted with a beautiful stark austerity, almost in the way early photographers documented the natural landscape.