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
Pitheads 1974 Bernd Becher and Hilla Becher 1931-2007, 1934-2015 Purchased 1974
The New Topographic image are 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.
Joe Deal
While working on his thesis for his MFA degree in the 1970s Deal started teaching at the University of California, Riverside, where he helped establish the UCR/California Museum of Photography. In 1989, he became dean of the School of Art at Washington University in St. Louis. He was named to serve as provost of the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, Rhode Island 1999, and lived there for the remainder of his life.
In the mid-1970s, Deal was one of ten photographers chosen to participate in the “New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape” exhibition curated by William Jenkins at the International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House. Deal contributed 18 black and white photographs to the exhibit in a 32 cm × 32 cm format. Many of the photographs Deal submitted featured homes newly constructed against the desolate landscape of the American Southwest.
He continued photographing the human effect on the landscape in The Fault Zone, which featured images combining human and geologic effects on the area surrounding the San Andreas Fault. Subdividing the Inland Basin featured suburban areas east of Los Angeles and Beach Cities focused on Pacific Ocean communities in Southern California. West and West: Reimagining the Great Plains featured photographs of the grid pattern of much of the Midwestern United States and was on exhibit at the University of Arizona‘s Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Arizona after opening at the Rhode Island School of Design and being presented at New York City’s Robert Mann Gallery.
A ten-year resident of Providence, Rhode Island, Deal died at a hospice there due to bladder cancer at age 62 on June 18, 2010. He is survived by his wife, Betsy Sara Ruppa, and a daughter, Meredith Deal.
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