Lewis Baltz

Lewis Baltz (September 12, 1945 – November 22, 2014) was a visual artist and photographer who became an important figure in the New Topographic movement of the late 1970s. His work has been published in a number of books, presented in numerous exhibitions, and appeared in museums such as the Museum of Modern Art.

Born in Newport Beach, California, Baltz graduated with a BFA in Fine Arts from San Francisco Art Institute in 1969 and held a Master of Fine Arts degree from Claremont Graduate School. He received several scholarships and awards including a scholarship from the National Endowment For the Arts (1973, 1977), the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship (1977).

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His books and exhibitions, his “topographic work”, such as The New Industrial Parks, Nevada, San Quentin Point, Candlestick Point (84 photographs documenting a public space near Candlestick Park, ruined by natural detritus and human intervention), expose the crisis of technology and define both objectivity and the role of the artist in photographs.

His work is focused on searching for beauty in desolation and destruction. Baltz’s images describe the architecture of the human landscape: offices, factories and parking lots. His pictures are the reflection of control, power, and influenced by and over human beings. His minimalistic photographs in the trilogy Ronde de Nuit, Docile Bodies, and Politics of Bacteria, picture the void of the other.

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What I like about his work: I think that the simpleness of his work makes him more memorable and along with the monochromatic photography, this makes more unique pieces. I also like that for this time this type of photography was to demonstrate the affects of mankind on the natural environment and his work demonstrates this well as the builders are the main focal point of the images.

Image Analysis

I have selected this image to analyse as I think the overall composition of the image is one of its main strengths, as it means that the silhouette of the mountain is the background of the image and that the main houses in the front create a focal point for the image. Furthermore, I think the lighting of this image brings and all of its features and makes it more cohesive as the lighting from under the roof trim of the house means that strong shadows are created, as the brightness of the lighting in the sky creates contrast between it and the outline of the mountains.

Additionally, I think that the clarity of the image makes it stand out more as the details in the brickwork of the building and even the blinds in the windows creates contrast. This is shown as theres lots of details within the foreground of the photograph and this lack in the background, however this is not a negative as it demonstrates the rule of thirds, as the pavement, housing and mountains/ skyline and very clearly separated in this piece. It’s also important to note how important the different shapes and lines are within this image, as the vertical lines contradicts with the horizon created but the mountain, and the squares and rectangles contrast with the smooth natural landscape. This is a good example of The New Topographic’s work as their is a manmade contrast created with the lighting in this image, as a somewhat natural contrast between the housing and landscape further away in the image.

Photoshoot 1	For my first photo shoot, I went down to the harbours and the block of flats near there. I went around 5:30 so that there was still good lighting.
Photoshoot 2	For my second photoshoot, it was the photography walk around Havre de pas and La Collette also near the harbour, this was from 2:20 – 3:20 with good lighting.

Contact Sheets

The day I went to the harbour it was sunny, with a bright blue sky which made a nice background to the photos. There are a few repeated photos as the sun was slowly starting to set so I kept having to change different settings on the camera to get the right lighting.

For this photoshoot, it was also a sunny day, with little clouding so there are no shadows in the photos and they also have a bright blue background from the sun. I tried to get a lot of different photos as I did not need to adjust the settings a lot as the lighting stayed the same a lot of the time.

Editing

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For my black and white edit, I have increased the contrast and only slightly increased the exposure to give the structure a darker look and have the background give an ombre type effect going from a dark grey into a lighter one. As I wanted it to be a darker image I have also decreased highlights, shadows, whites and blacks to get this edit. For the photo of the flats, I have increased the contrast up to 100 to get a brighter orange and extenuate the brick beneath it. I have increased the shadows and blacks also to try and help this as I really like the brighter orange against the white wall next to it.

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Similar to the black and white edit I did above I have increased the contrast but in this one, I did touch the exposure as I felt that if I decreased it the photo would be too dark and if I increased it the photo would be overexposed. I also didn’t adjust the highlights of shadows and I felt that only the white and black needed to be adjusted the get the effect that in I wanted. For the photo on the left, I wanted to keep it in colour to show the bright blue of the sky. For this edit, I increased the exposure to 58 to give the photo a more vibrant look and make the blue pop. I also decreased the highlights because I wanted the harsh line between the shadowed side and the lit side to be obvious and easily noticeable.

Final Images

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I chose the top left photo as one of my final images as I think that the colours all go together as the cream building sits nicely with the brighter blue of the sky. I also like the contrast between the two sides of the building and the harsh line going down the middle. I also like how there are small elements of blue in the different windows which I think helps the photo look more put together. I also think that it looks better having a little bit of the top cut off as there is not as much sky distracting from the building. I chose this to be one of my final images for the middle photo because I really like the contrast between the darker parts of the image and the brighter whites on the balconies.

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Urban Landscapes

Urban landscape photography involves capturing photos of cities and towns. Generally speaking, an urban landscape shot has a wide focus. Urban landscapes are complex structures which is a result of the interaction between human and their environment. It can also involve social, cultural and economic dimensions. They are also mainly formed and shaped under the influence of human activities. The main places which get photographed for Urban Landscapes are Industrial centres, Building sites, Flat blocks, Derelict buildings, Carparks and Harbours/dockyards.

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Thomas Struth

Thomas Struth is a German photographer who is best known for his Museum Photographs series, family portraits and black and white photographs of the streets of Dusseldorf and New York taken in the 1970s. In 1976, as part of a student exhibition at the Academy Struth attended he first showed a grid composed of 49 photographs taken from a centralized perspective on Düsseldorf’s deserted streets. In 1977, Struth and Hütte travelled to England for two months and teamed up to photograph different aspects of housing in the urban context of East London.

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Thomas Struth travelled to many different counties and cities to take photos with many of his fellow photographers. Struth photographed Rome (1984), Edinburgh (1985) and Tokyo (1986) for his project that largely consisted of black-and-white shots of streets and skyscrapers. These played a big part in his work, as many of his photographs were attempting to show the relationship people have with their modern-day environment.

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Thomas Struth studied under Bernd and Hilla Becher, they influenced Struth’s methodology towards photography, while his other professor, Gerhard Richter, inspired his interest in painterly images. His photographs are held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Gallery in London, and the Museum Kunst Palast in Düsseldorf.

Typologies

A typology is a single photograph or more commonly a body of photographic work, that shares a high level of consistency. This consistency is usually found within the subjects, environment, photographic process, and presentation or direction of the subject.

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The art of photographic typologies started with August Sanders in his 1929 series of portraits titled “Face of our time” which is a collection of works documenting German society between the two world wars. The term ‘typology’ wasn’t actually used to describe this type of photography till 1959 when Bernd and Hilla Becher began documenting dilapidated German industrial architecture. The art of typologies has had a renewed interest in recent years which is due to recognition from different galleries including the Tate Modern which hosted a Typologies retrospective in London in 2011.

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Bernd and Hilla Becher

Hilla Becher was a German artist born in 1931 in Siegen, Germany. She was one half of a photography duo with her husband Bernd Becher. For forty years, they photographed disappearing industrial architecture around Europe and North America. They began collaborating together in 1959 after meeting at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 1957. Bernd originally studied painting and then typography, whereas Hilla had trained as a commercial photographer. After two years of collaborating together, they married.

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They photographed Industrial structures including water towers, coal bunkers, gas tanks and factories. Their work had a documentary style as their images were always taken in black and white. Their photographs never included people. The Bechers work has also been referred to as sculpture. The Bechers called the subjects of their photographs ‘anonymous sculptures’, and they produced a successful photobook of the same title in 1970.

After selecting my images in lightroom and organising them with colour coding, I edited them.

Havres Des Pas and Housing Images

I edited most of these images in Black and White, with high contrast and grain added – this was to emulate the style of my chosen artist, John Myers. I edited a few images in both colour and black and white, as I wanted to create two versions to see which I liked better.

Here I edited my image in colour and black and white, as I wasn’t sure which I liked best. I think that black and white help to show the different shapes in the building, as well as highlight shadows. However, I think that the version in colour helps to show contrast between the different tones, as well as highlighting the overall shape of the building in contrast to the bright blue in the sky.

Machinery and Abstract Images

Again, for these images, I edited in black and white with strong contrast, adding blacks and decreasing highlights.

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Here I have produced two different edits -In the one on the left, I have used “B and W landscape” preset on lightroom, and on the right I had used my own editing. I prefer the edit on the left because the higher levels of contrast, and my use of cropping which improves the composition.

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In this edit, I used dramatic editing to accentuate the use of shadow and line – I used high contrast, slightly decreased the exposure and highlights, increased the blacks in the image, and added grain.

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Here I have produced two different editing styles – with presets on lightroom – the left is “landscape B and W” and the right is “Sepia toned B and W”

Typology Images

After selecting the images to use for my typologies in the style of Berndt and Hilla becher, I edited them in black and white with high contrast. I then imported them into photoshop, where I created a new A3 document for each piece. I then sized all my images the same, and placed them with equal borders in my desired layout.

Final typologies

I think my typologies were partly successful, but I found that I didn’t have as many images that would work well in the style of typologies as I thought. If I was to do this shoot again, I would make sure to capture more fronts of buildings with straight-on angles with the same amount of zoom, so the pictures fit together more cohesively in my final edits.

John Myers

John Myers’ remarkable, yet little-known, photographs present a tableau of life in the West Midlands of the 1970s as it has never been seen before.   In line with renewed interest in American landscape photography of the 70s, The New Topographics, Myers’ black-and-white portrait and landscape photography is attracting significant critical attention after going almost unnoticed for over 20 years.

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Working in Britain’s post-industrial Midlands from 1973-1981, Myers created an archive of the unspectacular that attracted attention at the time but then lay undisturbed for 30 years until a chance meeting with a curator. A solo show at Birmingham’s Ikon Gallery followed in 2011, kick-starting a comprehensive reappraisal at his work that’s resulted in more solo shows and several publications.

‘Landscape’ in its broadest sense can be used to describe Myers’ documentation of suburban life in his native West Midlands – the housing estates, blocks of flats, cul-de-sacs, garages, electricity substations and unsmiling portraits of the people that populated his local area. Myers evokes the streetscapes and uncomplicated certainties of Britain in the 1970s and the profound economic dislocation that took hold at the beginning of the 1980s.  

His new book, Looking at the Overlooked, is a glorious compendium of “the claustrophobia of the suburban landscape in the 1970s”. Focusing on substations, shops, houses, televisions, and so-called “landscapes without incident” – or as Myers puts it, “boring photographs” – the images are all recorded with a deadpan aesthetic that’s won Myers comparisons to the celebrated New Topographics movement in the USA.

His representations of mundane features of the urban environment are quite similar to work made in the States (Adams, Gohlke, Baltz). He was a typologist (television sets, electricity substations) before the Bechers made the term their own. Furthermore, his environmental portraits of ordinary Stourbridge residents owe something to Sander and Arbus but in their static, deadpan qualities also look forward to much work made in the 1990s and beyond (Dijkstra, Hunter, Struth).

This is one of John Myers’ images from his collection of 1970s images named “Boring Photos”, taken in black and white. The tones in this image are quite soft, with little contrast and a dull, flat sky. There is slight contrast in the tree and bush to the right and left of the image, which creates a little depth in the image. The use of line in this image is clear – all leading lines take the eye to the outside or edge of the image. For example, in the foreground, the horizontal line of the pavement splits the foreground and background up, which demonstrates the use of the rule of thirds in this image. Furthermore, the other obvious leading line in this image is the vanishing point in the background. The line of the field or hill in the background creates a solid contrast between the sky and the darker tones of the field. The uneventful composition and quiet mood of the image could suggest the lack of prospects in the area in which the image was taken or a “boring” town to live in. This would have been part of the reason Myers would have photographed this scene, as his interest in the developing face of middle-class Britain and the mundane link closely to this image.

Photoshoot plan

	Shot types	Genre	Equipment	Lighting	Camera settings
Photoshoot 1 – La Collette	Wide-angle, landscape, and portrait, Straight on in the same way for Typologies	Industrial landscapes, Typologies	Camera	Natural – bright and sunny	Landscape, Manual
Photoshoot 2 –	Wide-angle, portrait, and landscape, abstract, birds eye	The New Topographics, Urban Landscapes	Camera, tripod	Natural, bright	Landscape, manual

I am planning to do 2 shoots – one at and around La Collette, on our guided photoshoot, and another around St Helier, and possibly St Brelade. In my first shoot, I will focus on industrial landscapes, and I’m planning to take typology like images, to emulate the work of the Bechers. In my second shoot, I am planning to capture housing blocks, roads and estates to try and capture images like John Myers. I’m planning to then edit my images in black and white, and a few in colour.

Mood board

Plan:

Shooting during a sunset, a sunrise or at night in a full moon is a good idea because it will really bring out the darks and the whites like all the romanticism visual arts, the strong contrast will help to convey the power of the sublime. A cloudy, rainy, foggy and windy day would also be a good setting for the shoot as it would present nature at its finest. Photographing a path in the woods or a side road would make a good lines in the photograph.

Potential shoot locations:

devils hole, fern valley, grantez headland, any ruins, bunkers, forests, the sea, lighthouses, cliffs, sand dunes.

New topographics was a term invented by William Jenkins in 1975 to describe a group of American photographers (such as Robert Adams and Lewis Baltz) whose pictures had a similar minimal aesthetic, in that they were formal, mostly black and white prints of the urban landscape. Most images consisted of man-made objects in nature and run – down buildings, predominantly focused on textures.

New topographics was a reaction to idealised landscape photography that elevated the natural and the elemental, much like Ansel Adams’ work. New topographics emphasized man vs nature in form of photography, showing how urban areas and buildings had taken over nature, but photographed in a way that covered the ugly side of built-up areas and presented urban landscapes to look just as beautiful as nature.

ROBERT ADAMS

Robert Adams is one of the most important figures of modern American photography; a key figure in the New Topographics movement. He photographs in black and white, usually during daytime, of urban areas that are typically deserted, save for a few people that make an appearance in his work. Adams’ monochrome style was influenced by 19th-century photographers like Timothy O’Sullivan, William Henry Jackson and Carleton Watkin, who also focussed on the landscape of the West (in its more primitive state) as well as Lewis Hine, Edward Weston, Dorothea Lange and Ansel Adams, all of whom married social and aesthetic concerns in their work. 

The turning point in Adams’ career was the creation of his photo-essay, The New West, in 1974. Divided into five sections, the book takes us along the Colorado Rocky Mountains, with photos of the entire suburban Southwest. Starting from the empty streets and street signs, Robert Adams takes the viewer on a journey with him, finishing his book in the suburbs with the rapidly growing streets of houses and mobile homes in a sparse stretch of land, before presenting us with an entire town of these compact white caravans, which appear tiny and somehow insignificant against the backdrop of the towering mountains and an omnipresent sky to show the nature found amongst urban landscapes. 

LEWIS BALTZ

Whilst Robert Adams’ photography style combined nature with man-made landscapes, Baltz’ style of work is entirely urban. He made photographs in series focused on a particular theme and published them in book form, as in The New Industrial Parks Near Irvine, California (1975), Nevada (1978) and Park City (1981). His work, like Adams, challenges the tradition of western landscape photography by presenting a less innocent view of the landscape. Baltz’s perception of the landscape reveals the effects of twentieth-century culture and suburban development on the nation’s topography.

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One of his most famous works, The New Industrial Parks is part of a series developed in the 1970s deals with wide-ranging cultural and philosophical questions about the growing urban landscape. By focusing his attention on the familiar, Baltz created a powerful work in his critical photographic approach to the built environment.

MY PLAN

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My plan for urban landscape photos is to focus on decaying or derelict buildings/constructions as i’ve always been drawn to them and now have the chance to photograph them. I chose some photos of abandoned places that i both like and appeal to the theme of new topographics. I also plan to photograph busy, urban areas like town or parks. My images will be in black and white to mimic photographers of the new topographics era and i will try to eliminate any unnecessary objects in the photos to give a miminal approach like Lewis Baltz’ work.

“New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape” was an exhibition that epitomized a key moment in American landscape photography. The term “New Topographics” was 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 popular photographers that were linked to New Topographic 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.

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These photographers began to move away from traditional landscape photographs of natural views and started photographing what replaced them, unromanticised views of stark industrial landscapes, suburban sprawl, and everyday scenes which are not usually given a second glance. 

Joel Sternfeld

Joel Sternfeld is an American fine-art colour photographer. He is known for his large-format documentary pictures of the United States and helping establish colour photography as a respected artistic medium. Sternfeld began taking colour photographs in 1970 after learning the colour theory of Johannes Itten and Josef Albers. Colour is an important element of his photographs. Joel Sternfeld produced many books but one of his most popular being American Prospects.

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American Prospects (1987) is Sternfeld’s most known book and explores the irony of human-altered landscapes in the United States. To make the book, Sternfeld photographed ordinary things, including unsuccessful towns and barren-looking landscapes. Sternfelds work looks more into utopic and dystopic possibilities of the American experience which is mainly shown through his pieces in this book. Walker Evans was a big role model for Sternfeld and much like Evans he continued working in the tradition of American naturalist colour photography. Seen through his lens, the late-1970s’ America oscillates between artificial, nostalgic paradises and crude reality.

“I picked this title because the word ‘prospect’ has several meanings in English: first, it means ‘view.’ In New England, when a new farm is being built, care is taken to give the farmer’s wife a nice view from the kitchen window (nice for the women, right?). ‘Prospect’ also means ‘seen from above, perspective,’ which goes well with my working method. But it also signifies possibility, hope, future, like when you prospect for gold, you hope to find something…,” Stated Sternfeld

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.

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Contact Sheets

When taking these photos, I made sure to use a variety of angles and distances to get a range of different images.

Best Shots

I went through all of my images and decided which ones I liked best and thought could be enhanced through editing to look even better.

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On the left is my image taken in St Ouens on a stormy day. On the right is an image taken by Ansel Adams which was captured in Wyoming.

Both of these images have many similarities and some differences. To compare these images, I first saw the way the mud tracks from my image and the river in the second image have very similar features such as, they both start at the bottom of the photo and turn out of the range of the landscape captured. Also, both images are displayed in black and white which has a very good effect on images that display colours of green and brown. Another similarity is that if both images werent in black and white they would both have a very similar colour scheme including colours such as, green, white, brown and grey.

I have also noticed a few differences between the two images. One of these differences is that my image has many man-made things such as, football field, playground, and the tractor mud tracks, however in Ansel Adams image all scenery displayed is natural with no man-made structures in range of sight. I also noticed the image by Ansel Adams shows a lot of landscape which is hidden by the shadows and in my image it only has a small range captured.