Topography

Topography highlighted the changes in the world, it was a rejection of romanticism and its ideas. Instead of highlighting nature, it highlighted the industrial world and how it has destroyed nature. 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.

These are two very famous images made by Robert Adams and Frank Gohlke.

Robert Adams

Robert Adams was the first person to properly go against Ansel Adams’ (who is completely unrelated to him) ideas of photography and romanticism.

It was said that “his subject has been the American west: its vastness, its sparse beauty and its ecological fragility…What he has photographed constantly – in varying shades of grey – is “what has been lost and what remains” and that “his work’s other great subtext” is silence…”

Analysis of an image

This image has a very dark tone to it, this could suggest the disappointment from Robert Adams about the industrial world, it could also show the loneliness of the woman in the image, she is stood alone in the house, that you could say looks like a jail cell because of how boxy it is. I think the conflict of the natural world and the industrial world is the woman being in the jail-like house as it could be said she is of the natural world, being human. Like I said before, the image is very boxy, apart from the woman, most of the lines are straight lines, quite often making squares, this once again creating a jail-like box around the woman.