Robert Adams born in 1937 New Jersey, is an American photographer who’s work is focused on the changing landscape of the American West. Adams moved to a suburb in Colorado with his family in 1954, this is where much of Adams photos and work are based. His work first became popular in the mid-1970s through his participation in the New Topographics exhibition. In the 1970s and 1980s Adams produced a series of books such as, The New West, Denver, What We Bought and Summer Nights these books focused on expanding suburbs along Colorado’s landscape, these books pictured huge rural developments but also the surviving light, size and shape of the natural world. 

Robert Adam’s work

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Robert Adams photos portray how the new post-war developments of the modern world have spilled into the old American west. The photos show above depict newly developed buildings and structures that are still surrounded by nature and the old landscape, suggesting that nature is still around us all the time no matter how much humans build. The photos are all shot in black and white, which perfectly matches the locations that they are taken in, barren and empty expanses of land with small marks of human life and buildings.

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This photograph, taken in 1973 by Adams, depicts a mobile home estate in Colorado, with a huge mountain and barren landscape behind. Its almost as if Adams has put two images together, the top being the natural landscape of the world, and the bottom half being the ugly buildings that humanity have ruined the landscape with. Like all of Adams other photos, this photo is shot in black and white, which adds to the whole image. The lack of colours emphasize the vast location where the photo is taken, and adds to the separation between nature and man-made.

Ansel Adams

Ansel Adams was an American landscape photographer and environmentalist known for his black and white images of west America as well as helping find Group f/64, advocating “pure” photography (sharp focus, use of the full tonal range of a photograph), he went on to develop an image making system called the Zone System through the deep understanding of how tonal rage is recorded and developed, resulting in clear, deep images. Ansel was a environmental conversation advocate and conveyed this through his photography.

In 1916, at 14 years old, Adams photographed Yosemite National Park and developed his work at the Sierra Club where he would come back every summer of his life. In 1925 he became the director of the club till 1971. In 1980, President Jimmy Carter awarded Adams the Presidential Medal of Freedom for “efforts to preserve this country’s wild and scenic areas, both on film and on earth.”

Image analysis

This image by Ansel Adams presents the Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming. In the foreground we can see trees as well as the river which makes a good strong line, leading our eyes from the foreground, through the midground, all the way to the mountains and clouds in the background. The shot is taken from afar which distances the viewer and shows how small we are as humans in comparison to nature, it puts the power of the sublime in perspective and makes the viewer respect it. The image being black and white also creates a detaching effect by contrasting two colours; dark shades such as black feel further away than lighter shades. Humans don’t tend to see in black and white so this change of perspective can distance it from reality. A pallet of colours can often distract the viewer from the subject thus you can convey the meaning of a photograph in a more powerful manner using a monochrome format. This photo was taken using a natural light source, considering the clouds we can assume it was dull and cold light. The dark clouds contrast well with the bright clouds The textures, lines and shapes, such as the ripples in the water, appear more prominent since black and white create such a powerful contrast, this makes the photograph look harsh and cold. There is a lot of grey in the photograph which makes the tone sombre and dark. The overall mood is heavy and melancholic.

Who is he?

An American photographer who has focused on the changing landscape of the American West. His work first came to prominence in the mid-1970s through his book The New West and his participation in the exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape in 1975.

 In the 1970s and 1980s he produced a series of books, The New West, Denver, What We Bought, Summer Nights which focused on expanding suburbs along Colorado’s Front Range, books that pictured heedless development but also the surviving light, scale, form, and silence of the natural world. He also examined this mixture of humanity’s imprint and nature’s resilience in the wider western landscape he has also occasionally published smaller, sometimes more personal volumes.

His work

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These photographs are what I am going to mainly base mine on, following his widely spread landscapes.

The New Topographics–

The New Topographics was a term developed in 1975 by William Jenkins, used to describe a group of (mainly American) Urban landscape photographers. Their work was mostly in black and white, and looked at the relationship between human development and the natural world. Some notable members of this group include Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Nicholas Nixon, and Bernd and Hiller Becher. Their works are often in a deadpan or banal aesthetic, used to show the rigid, stark design of industrial construction.

Rut Blees Luxemburg Case Study–

Rut Blees Luxemburg is a German-born, British Photographer. Her images are mostly of Urban Landscapes at night, using vibrant colours and unique lighting to create unique and memorable images.

An image taken by Luxemburg in 1999. It is of some city steps while it is raining and night. The water reflects a harsh city light juxtaposing the dark concrete of the stairs and walls, making it look like there is a waterfall of light. These playful and unique compositions contrast the stark industrial architecture of many cities and perfectly fits the goal of the New Topographics movement. There are no people in this image, only the remainders of some footsteps being swallowed by the rain, making the audience feel isolated and lonely, as well as making them to experience the sublime, the footsteps being washed away as a reminder of how small humanity really is in comparison to nature, even in a big city.

i edited this image until i was happy with how it looked then i made a virtual copy and changed the copy to black and white to see which one would be better because a lot of the examples i looked at where black and white.

this images was taken along the grosnez coast line which has the tallest cliffs in jersey. i also experimented with putting this in black and white aswell

this image is of the pinacle in gorsnez i used the gourse bush to give depth to the images with a forground a mid ground and the swell breaking in the background. i also experimented with putting this image in black and white

this image is of white rock with the vibrance turned up to show of the beatiful blues in the background of the image. the forgroun of the headland gives depth to the image and the swell around the rock outline the focal point and the pointey shape of the rock brings your focal pooitn from the bottom up to the white rock on the top.

this mages shows the the beach of le Braie in the foreground the Hedland in the midground and Corriere lighthouse in the background. I liked the effect the sea spray created mist around the headland and the lighthouse. I edited this image bring out a wider range of colours in the sky to highlight the paragliders.

i experimented with a similar image taken in landscape, that I put in two tones because I looked the effect it gave between the darker bottom of the image and the lighter tones in the sky.

i think this is my best image from rural landscapes bec asue it captures the a large expanse with the focal point of the image goes to the larger boulder in the center of the frame the bunker in the background also helps add depth to the image with a background and midground and forground.

Joel Sternfeld is an American fine-art colour photographer. He is noted for his large-format documentary pictures of the United States and helping establish colour photography as a respected artistic medium. Sternfeld’s work is held in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Joel was influenced by the roadside photography of Walker Evans, Sternfeld’s projects document people and places with an exacting sense of colour that visually rhymes with the subject matter, as seen in his seminal series American Prospects (1987). “No individual photo explains anything.

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Even though Joel Sternfeld isn’t your typical “street photographer” he started off as one. Although he was inspired by his contemporaries at the time and started off shooting with a 35mm Leica (like everyone else) he eventually branched out and found his own voice shooting large-format 8×10 colour landscape photographs.

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American Prospects – Book by Joel Sternfeld

American Prospects is a book that was first published in 1987 and was produced by Joel Sternfeld. The book contains 152 pages and 71 images all displayed in the same way. All the images that are in the book all have similar features such as a slight natural location with a few man-made structures throughout. The book usually costs around £85-£100.

new topographical photography show the beauty in the mundane, reflection of the increasingly suburbanised world. reaction to the tyranny of idealised landscape photography that elevated the natural and the elemental.

 Robert Adams, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Lewis Baltz, Joe Deal, Frank Gohlke, Nicholas Nixon, John Schott, Stephen Shore, and Henry Wessel Jr are all the people that started the new topographical movement. 1975 exhibition New Topographic signalled a radical shift away from traditional landscapes.

This image was taken by Robert Adam and I like the juxtaposition between the foreground of the man made harsh white boxes and the background of the rolling hills with smooth organic shapes along the horizon. image is like a before and after because it shows the earth as it was the unnatural shapes humans have produced that litter the earth.

This image has a wider angle which shows more of the organic environment which makes the sea of white boxes look out of place. this images shows the natural foreground with a man made midground and a natural background which greatest a sandwiching affect which makes the mobile homes look even more out of place.

This is my mood bored of different new topographic images that will inspire me to take images around Jersey

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

About

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.

Parking lots, suburban housing and warehouses were all depicted with a beautiful stark austerity, almost in the way early photographers documented the natural landscape. 

What was both novel and challenging about New Topographics was not only the photographs’ content, but how they made viewers feel. By foregrounding, rather than erasing human presence, the photographs placed people into a stance of responsibility towards the landscape’s future—a position that resonated with ecology, the branch of environmental thought that was gaining traction in the 1970s.

Ansel adams topography

Ansel Adams wanted his viewers to feel as uplifted as he had when looking at the scenery in person. His photographs contributed to the cause of conservationism, the environmental approach that seeks to preserve landscapes and protect them from human democracy.

New Topographics represented a radical shift of landscape photography from photos of the natural environment, to photos of the built new developing environment. 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 new delepoing areas of America. Carparks, suburban housing and warehouses were all photographed with beauty that they were not considered to have, almost in the way early photographers documented the natural landscape. These new topographic photographers were less concerned with portraying an ideal image of nature and were more interested in showing plainly how man has altered it.

Examples of the New Topographic images

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These images depict the difference between the natural landscape of the world, and how man-made structures have altered the natural landscape. In the images you can see man made structures that still contain natural landscapes and nature around them, depicting that even though the world has been impacted by these structures, nature still exists around them.

What was the New Topographics a reaction to?

It can be argued that the New Topographics was a reaction to the traditional photographs of landscapes taken by photographers such as Ansel Adams. These new photographers wanted to shift away from the traditional landscape photos to create new unusual landscape photographs of the new developing world, a huge shift away. These new photos of everyday buildings taking over nature, placed people into a stance of responsibility towards the landscape’s future, a branch of thought which became very popular in the 1970s.

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New Topographic -was a term coined by William Jenkins in 1975 to describe a group of American photographers whose pictures had a similar aesthetic, in that they were formal, mostly black and white prints of the urban landscapes

These photographers 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.

Henry Wessel examples

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what was the new topographics a reaction to?

is a reaction to a newly formed man made environment and its impact on nature itself it also represents what environments people encounter in their day to day life