The “New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape” was an exhibition held by William Jenkins in 1975 that epitomized a key moment in American landscape photography. 

It featured ten photographers 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 landscapes with some of their works featuring parking lots, suburban housing and warehouses. These were all depicted with a beautiful stark austerity, almost in the way early photographers documented the natural landscape. The exhibition revealed the growing unease about how the natural landscape was being eroded by industrial development. This contradicted the previous movement of Romanticism.