The 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.

For “New Topographics” William Jenkins selected eight then-young American photographers: Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Joe Deal,^[6]Frank Gohlke, Nicholas Nixon, John Schott,^[7]Stephen Shore, and Henry Wessel, Jr. He also invited the German couple, Bernd and Hilla Becher, then teaching at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in Germany. Since the late 1950s the Bechers had been photographing various obsolete structures, mainly post-industrial carcasses or carcasses-to-be, in Europe and America. They first exhibited them in series, as “typologies”, often shown in grids, under the title of “Anonymous Sculptures.” They were soon adopted by the Conceptual Art movement.

I started by going through my best shots and edited the ones I thought I could enhance via editing.

Edits

I felt inspired by Roger Fenton’s work so I attempted to make my image looks similar to his through editing.

—-Edit 1: ————————

In order to create this edit, I cropped the image slightly in order to draw more attention to the dug up sand [the main focus of the image]. From there, I increased the temperature of the photo and increased the saturation slightly, giving the image a yellow tint. I decided that in order to improve my edit further, I would increase the sharpness and contrast which helped the smaller details within the image stand out more.

—-Edit 2: ————————

I started this edit by increasing the temperature, making the image warmer. I then decreased the contrast and shadows which allowed the yellow highlights to stand out more without distracting from the main focus of the image. Finally, I finished my edit by increasing the sharpness which allowed the image to be seen clearly.

—-Edit 3: ————————

I began this edit by increasing the temperature of the image, however, I didn’t like the way it looked so I tinted the shadows orange and pink in order to exaggerate the shadows so they wouldn’t be drowned out by the rest of the image. Next, I lowered the exposure of the image slightly along with the contrast to create a softer look. I then finished off my edit by increasing the sharpness and highlights, adding a bit of contrast between the different yellow tones in the image.

—-Edit 4: ————————

I made this edit by tinting the highlights yellow and the shadows orange which made the colours in the image blend together nicely. I increased the exposure of the image slightly before decreasing the contrast as it made the shadows in the image look a little softer and made the highlights look a little more golden. I finished off the edit by increasing the sharpness which made the foreground clearer and kept the rest of the image somewhat soft-looking.

—-Edit 5: ————————

I began this edit by increasing the temperature, tinting the midtones yellow and the shadows orange. This created a variety of yellow tones within the trees which made the image feel warmer and slightly aged. Then, I decreased the contrast a little as I wanted the shadows to look slightly softer whilst still allowing some of the details within the trees to remain dark and hidden. I finished the edit by increasing the sharpness and the vibrance of the image, causing the yellows to really pop out.

The two images of Ansel Adams’ above have similar characteristics of my image below. There are a wide variety of tonal values in all images, my image perhaps has less greys and only a sharp contrast between almost pure white and pure black. My image has less definition/ is not in as sharp as a focus, this could be changed by changing the aperture setting, which secures greater depth of field (i.e. Ansel Adams often shot in an aperture setting of f64). My image is also really intriguing to me as the perception of the image presents itself as an optical illusion, with some questioning over what the image actually is, whether it be a close up photo of roots or trees from afar, Adams’ image of roots gives this same effect where the tangled roots look almost scalic and alive rather than just being roots.

Ansel Adams

Adams received his first camera in 1916 at age 12, a Kodak #1 box brownie camera, on a visit to Yosemite National Park and proved to be a talented photographer. He continued creating impressive landscapes all throughout the 1920s after becoming a custodian for the Sierra Club’s Lodge at Yosemite National Park.

Analysing Ansel Adams Work

In this photo, Adams used the camera in order to create a lot of contrast between everything in frame, capturing a variety of tones which makes every detail within the image stand out without over/under exposing the photo. His use of depth of field has allowed his image to be completely in focus including both the foreground and the background, allowing the beauty of the environment to be clearly in frame. This was due to Adams’ goal of using photography in order to promote the conservation of the environment and wilderness areas which made him pay close attention to how he planned on capturing what was in front of him.

Moodboard

Mindmap

biography

Robert Adams was born in Orange, New Jersey, in 1937. His refined black-and-white photographs document scenes of the American West of the past four decades, revealing the impact of human activity on the last vestiges of wilderness and open space. Although often devoid of human subjects, or sparsely populated, Adams’s photographs capture the physical traces of human life: a garbage-strewn roadside, a clear-cut forest, a half-built house. An underlying tension in Adams’s body of work is the contradiction between landscapes visibly transformed or scarred by human presence and the inherent beauty of light and land rendered by the camera.

photography

Adams’s complex photographs expose the hollowness of the nineteenth-century American doctrine of Manifest Destiny, expressing sombre indignation at the idea (still alive in the twenty-first century) that the West represents an unlimited natural resource for human consumption. But his work also conveys hope that change can be effected, and it speaks with joy of what remains glorious in the West. Adams received a BA from the University of Redlands in California and a PhD in English from the University of Southern California. He has received numerous awards, including a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Award (1994); the Spectrum International Prize for Photography (1995); and the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize (2006). Major exhibitions include San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2005); Yale University Art Gallery (2002); Denver Art Museum (1993); Philadelphia Museum of Art (1989); and the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1979). Adams lives and works in north-western Oregon.

Urban photography is a broad term describing photography that showcases all aspects of an urban environment, combining elements of many other types of photography, including portrait, fine-art, landscape, and architecture photography as well as photojournalism.

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The New Topographics

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.

This piece by photographers Bernd Becher and Hilla Becher (German conceptual artists) consists of pictures of oil pumps in urban areas and are arranged in grids to highlight the formal similarities of each structure. In each image they use the same lighting and straight-on camera angle to give off the image that these things are bland and uniform.

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I took around 150-200 photos trying to get a good diverse mix of different rural landscapes.

After completing my photoshoots I uploaded my images to Adobe Lightroom Classic and created a category system where I chose my favourite images from each different type of terrain so I could have a variety of images.

Then I edited the images, choosing between resizing them to concentrate on a main part of the landscape or whether they should be black and white or coloured.

For example, on the image above I changed it to black and white then cropped out an area which was highly overexposed as I wanted to concentrate on the shadows the trees were creating.

As I wanted to concentrate on the shadows I turned up shadows in Lightroom and made the image have more of a contrast between the trees and the sky in the background, I thought this really added more dimension to the image as concentrating on the shadows (which are slanted) versus the trees added an almost optical illusion aspect to the image.

The editing itself made the image look quite grainy but I really like this look as it incorporates different textures into the image i.e. the pure white blankness of the sky then the diverse tonal contrasts between the greys of the grass.

I did similar editing for my black and white images, making sure to highlight large tonal contrasts in the images as Ansel Adams did, as well as create a very visible textural contrast on images.

The majority of my favourite edited images are black and white.

After editing my images I then narrowed down my selection to my best images, seen below

The New Topographics

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

An exhibition at the International Museum of Photography in Rochester, New York featuring these photographers also revealed the growing unease about how the natural landscape was being eroded by industrial development. The new topographics were to have a decisive influence on later photographers including those artists who became known as the Düsseldorf School of Photography.

Before the New Topographics created a shift in landscape photography, photographers such as Ansel Adams presented nature as separate from human presence. Adams photographed scenery in a manner intended to provoke feelings of awe and pleasure in the viewer. He used vantage points that emphasized the towering scale of mountain peaks and embraced a wide tonal range from black to white to record texture and dramatic effects of light and weather. The New Topographics brought the new idea that both nature and human presence exist together more and more, as industry and civilisation expand to cover areas that once existed without the presence of people.

 In one way, they were photographing against the tradition of nature photography that the likes of Ansel Adams and Edward Weston had created.

What were the new topographics a reaction to?

The authentic images of the new topographics were a reflection of the increasingly suburbanised world around them, with people and industry growing further out of cities and into the countryside. They were also a reaction to the rules of idealised landscape photography that elevated the natural and the elemental.

Typologies – Bernd and Hilla Becher

Bernd and Hilla Becher were the only photographers in the group to illustrate nineteenth-century subjects; instead, the husband and wife team, credited with the founding of the Düsseldorf school, documented nineteenth-century industrial decay. The Bechers worked exclusively in black and white, as did all the other photographers in the exhibition, with the exception of Stephen Shore. 

Bernhard “Bernd” Becher, and Hilla Becher, were German conceptual artists and photographers working as a collaborative duo. They are best known for their extensive series of photographic images, or typologies, of industrial buildings and structures, often organised in grids.

Their ‘objective’ methods of taking their images relate to their connection to the new topographics, with their authentic and stark images of industrial structures with vast landscapes behind them – this shows how their surrounding area was affected by industrialisation.

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Together, the Bechers went out with a large 8 x 10-inch view camera and photographed these buildings from several different angles, but always with a straightforward “objective” point of view. They shot only on overcast days, to avoid shadows, and early in the morning during spring and autumn. Bernd and Hilla Becher first began their project of systematically photographing industrial structures – water towers, blast furnaces, gas tanks, mine heads, grain elevators and others – in the late 1950s.

For my first photoshoot, focussing on urban landscapes, I began at the top of fort regent which I didn’t like and then I went into town to the financial district which is full of many office buildings which are very modern which simple square/rectangular shapes. I explored a range of different angles to explore the variety of lightning and shapes which the offices provided. I really enjoyed this because I like how the darker background as I took these during the evening contrasts against the bright, white lights of the building which illuminate it and bring it to life.

These are my best shots which I have chosen from my photoshoot which I chose on Adobe Lightroom by uploading them and then going through them by selecting them by pressing ‘Z’ when I liked a photo and thought it was successful. Next I will be choosing 4 pictures to experiment with and edit on Lightroom in my sleeted photographers styles.

My 4 photos –

Throughout this photoshoot, I gathered 16 photos which I think are my best shots to show a urban landscape which I can edit and experiment on in Adobe Lightroom. I really like how these 4 photos turned out because they are able to be similar to my photographers work, Rut Blees Luxemburg and Thomas Struth, as they both focus on taking pictures of office buildings whereas Luxemburg does this at night which I did for this photoshoot and during the day will be my 2nd photoshoot. I wanted to focus on the angles ad shapes which have been illuminated due to the lighting from the office buildings in this and I really like the photo of the underpass as it shoes 2 cars going opposite ways and the dark, orange lighting makes it look old and rustic. In Adobe Lightroom while editing I’m going to experiment with different filters such as black and white and different ways to crop the photos to make them look unusual and solely focussed on the buildings with little background.