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. – Tate.org
SOME KEY NEW TOPOGRAPHIC PHOTOGRAPHERS
Lewis Baltz 
Joe Deal 
Frank Gohlke 
Henry Wessel Jr.
What was the new topographics a reaction to?
Their stark, beautifully printed images of this mundane but oddly fascinating topography was both a reflection of the increasingly suburbanised world around them, and a reaction to the tyranny of idealised landscape photography that elevated the natural and the elemental. – The Guardian
This means that the New Topographics was a reaction to the urbanization of the natural landscape. Many images display the juxtaposition between the newly built towns and buildings and the untouched nature in the background that has not yet been built on or changed.