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. 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 show consisted of 168 rigorously formal, black-and-white prints of streets, warehouses, city centres, industrial sites and suburban houses. Taken collectively, they seemed to posit an aesthetic of the banal.
America experienced a robust growth till the early 1970s, with this, the historical background of urban America was founded, a full swing urban growth which coincided with the period of baby boom (1946-mid 60s). Seventy-six million children were born, creating an enormous demand for housing, meaning once natural landscapes were built upon, becoming heavily urbanised and industrialised. The word urban (derived from from Latin word “urbane”) relates to or constituting a city. It also means polished and smooth, obviously a stark contrast to the natural soft shapes of natural landscape which were being photographed in the subject of romanticism.
IMPORTANT URBAN LANDSCAPE PHOTOGRAPHERS
JOEL STERNFELD
Joel Sternfeld is a seminal contemporary American artist known for his large-format colour photographs of American towns and cities. 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. That’s what makes photography such a wonderful and problematic medium,” he reflected. “It is the photographer’s job to get this medium to say what you need it to say.” Born on June 30, 1944 in New York, NY, he received his BA in visual art from Dartmouth College in 1965.
Sternfeld’s projects have consistently explored the possibility of a collective American identity by documenting ordinary people and places throughout the country. Each project he embarks on is bound by a concept that imbues it with subtle irony, often through insightful visual juxtapositions or by pairing images with informational text. Another characteristic aspect of Sternfeld’s work is that colour is never arbitrary; it functions in highly sophisticated ways to connect elements and resonate emotion.
HENRY WESSEL JR
Originally from New Jersey, Henry Wessel, Jr. fell in love with the California light on a visit in 1970. Immediately afterwards, he moved to San Francisco, immersing himself in the sights and spaces of California. Wessel created his “House Pictures” series in Southern California from the armrest of his truck in the early 1990s.
The images appear as a survey of playfully candy-coloured bungalows that suggest a human presence only in details, such as a modest cooler left curb side or a garden hose coiled against the side of a house. Although different in colour, the structural similarities of the bungalows—as well as the similar compositions of the photographs themselves—imply both the futility of originality and the manufactured quality of the American dream of home ownership. Wessel continued this banal, casual aesthetic with all his images- capturing Californian suburbia life through material belongings.
ROBERT ADAMS
Robert Adams is an American photographer best known for his images of the American West. Offering solemn meditations on the landscapes of California, Colorado, and Oregon, Adams’s black-and-white photos document the changes wrought by humans upon nature. “By Interstate 70: a dog skeleton, a vacuum cleaner, TV dinners, a doll, a pie, rolls of carpet. Later, next to the South Platte River: algae, broken concrete, jet contrails, the smell of crude oil,” he wrote. “What I hope to document, though not at the expense of surface detail, is the form that underlies this apparent chaos.”
Born on May 8, 1937 in Orange, NJ, his family moved around the Midwest throughout his childhood, finally settling in Wheat Ridge, CO in 1952. Adams went on to study English at the University of Redlands and received his PhD in English from the University of Southern California in 1965. It wasn’t until the near completion of his dissertation for USC that Adams began to take photography seriously, learning techniques from professional photographer Myron Wood and reading Aperture magazine. In the 1970s, he was released the book The New West (1974), and a year later was included in the seminal exhibition “New Topographics”: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape.
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