What is New Topographics?

New Topographics was a term created by William Jenkins in 1975 to describe a group of American photographers whose pictures had a similar banal aesthetic in that they were formal, and mostly black and white prints of the urban landscape.

Most of the photographers associated with New Topographics, including; Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Nicholas Nixon and Bernd and Hiller Becher. They were all inspired by the man made building and the urban landscape, things like garages and suburban housing also car parks.

What was New Topographics a reaction to?

New Topographics was a reaction to Ansel Adams’ images. Photographers like the ones above wanted to photo the manmade world instead of the natural environment. Ansel Adams would go through a lot more effort to take his images which makes it difficult for people to photograph things like that, whereas with New Topographics it is easier for everyone to take photos as you could simply walk around and find manmade structures that are interesting to photograph.

Stephen Shore

Stephen shore (born in 1947), is an American photographer who is best known for his images of banal scenes and objects. He was interested in photography from an early age and his first camera was a kodak junior, then 3 years later he got a 35mm camera and made his first colour photographs.

Stephen shore image analysis.

This image by Stephen Shore shows a lot of rectangular and square shaped things, with the signs and traffic lights. There is also the contrast of the mountains in the background and all of the manmade things in the foreground of the image. The image is full of colour and has a light tone to it, also an old effect because of the old camera that is being used. This image also includes the staple colours of the American flag on the gas station sign which is the closest thing in the image and could be the main focus for people in this image. This image is also connected to the New Topographics movement which went against Ansel Adams and his photography of the natural landscape.

Robert Adams

Robert Adams (born in 1937) is a photographer who is best known for documenting both the natural and the manmade areas of the American west. While Adams was teaching English at Colorado college, he began taking pictures of nature and architecture with a 35mm reflex camera, also learned photographic techniques from the professional photographer Myron Wood.

Robert Adams image analysis

This image shows the beginning of construction. You see the main focus of the man working on the construction and what looks like him digging up the land to start building. Because of how close this is to the foreground of the image it is what you first look at and not the natural land and mountains in the background, which have not yet been altered by people and manmade things. The mountains in the background almost look like they have been photoshopped in as they are really faded. The image is in black and white which gives an old style and also the minimal building equipment shows that back they didn’t have any help from electrical equipment and had to do almost all of the work by hand. In the image there is a lot of flat land apart from the mountains in the back ground and the hill that has been created from the hole being dug. This creates a sense of emptiness because there is nothing but flat land.

About Ansel Adams

Ansel Adams, (born in San Francisco in 1902 and died in 1984) was a photographer and environmentalist. When Adams was four years of age he was a victim to the great earthquake and fire of 1906. This earthquake threw him to the ground and because of this he badly broke his nose, distinctly marking him for life. A year later the family fortune collapsed in the financial panic of 1907. The most important result of Adams’s somewhat different and more difficult childhood was the joy that he found in nature and photography.

The face of half dome

This is one of Ansel Adams most popular images. He went through a lot of travelling and hiking up snowy mountains to get the photo. On the right is the first image he took without a red colour filter on the camera. Adams felt that the image had no drama and outstanding quality to it, so he decided to take another photo but using a red colour filter on the camera. This made the image more dramatic and gave a huge range of black to white tones, with the sky being black and the snow and some parts of the mountain being white.

The pixilation of this image shows that Adams managed to include each tone on the black to white scale. This could of encouraged him to make his zone system, which he created in 1940.

The zone system

This zone system was created by Ansel Adams and Fred Archer. They developed this zone system to help photographers control their black and white images. It was also designed to provide structure for determining exposure, which ensured that the photographer could create a properly exposed image each time they took a photo. It was made to put the 11 zones into order of gradient. Each zone represents all of the different tones you would see in a black and white photo.

Mood board of images by Ansel Adams

This range of images Adams has produced shows the efforts he went through to take these photos. With many of them being of mountains and high up places looking over valleys and rivers. All of the images show a gradient going from black to white and having every shade inbetween.

The large format camera takes images with the measurements of 4*5 inches or more. The camera is large and heavy and best for taking and producing high quality prints. The two main type of large format cameras are: field and studio cameras.

This camera was used by Adams. It was not digital and had no exposure settings. There were different colour filters that you could switch between to change the look of the photo. Adams had to carry this camera with him when he hiked up mountains/hills and went through a lot of work to get the right photo.

Group F/64

The group f/64 was formed in 1932. They were a loose association of California photographers who promoted a style of sharply detailed purist photography. The original group members were; Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, Edward Weston, Willard Van Dyke, John Paul Edwards, Brett Weston, Conseulo Kanaga, Alma Lavenson, Sonya Noskowiak and Preston Holder. The name of this group was taken from the smallest setting of large-format camera diaphragm aperture that gives a good resolution of depth of field. Even though the members of the group had a wide range of subject matter in their work, they were all similar in the way that they all used the camera to photograph life as it is.

Jem Shoutham

Jem Southam is a British landscape photographer, born in Bristol in 1950. He studied creative photography at the London college of printing then worked at a gallery in Bristol from 1976 to 1982. Southam conducts long-term studies that trace over seasons and sometimes several years. His first project was in black and white, ‘The floating harbour’: a Landscape History of Bristol City Docks.

Fay Godwin

Fay Godwin was born in Berlin, Germany in 1931 and died in Hastings England in 2005. She first produced portraits of dozens of well-known writers and significant literary figures in the 1970’s and 80’s. In the 1990’s she was offered a fellowship at the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television in Bradford. This pushed her work in the direction of colour and urban documentary. She began taking photos of close-up natural forms

“My way into photography was through family snaps in the mid-1960s. I had no formal training, but after the snaps came portraits, reportage, and finally, through my love of walking, landscape photography, all in black and white. A Fellowship with the National Museum of Photography in Bradford led to urban landscape in colour, and very personal close-up work in colour has followed”.— Fay Godwin, ca. 2000

Don McCullin

Don McCullin was born in London in 1935. He has mild dyslexia but displayed a talent for drawing at the secondary modern school he went to. He later won a scholarship to Hammersmith school of Arts and Crafts, but because of the death of his father he left school at 15 and had no qualifications. Later on, in 1953 he was called up for national service with the Royal Air Force. Most of the images that McCullin has taken are related to war as he was part of the Air Force and was involved in different wars. He also photographed the land in his home town of Somerset, photographing marsh land and flooded areas.

Friedrich was a 19th century German painter who painted and influenced the Romanticism movement. His paintings often featured the romantic landscapes with a small human element involved. Before Friedrich became known there were very few artists painting landscapes and the genre of landscape wasn’t at all considered as major. With the rising recognition of Friedrich, the genre of landscape became more popular and artists started to paint nature and landscapes. Friedrich’s painting look at landscapes through the lens of the “sublime”. His landscapes are often described as expansive, grand and sometimes thought to bring fear because of the thought of connecting with peoples spiritual side. Friedrich’s landscape paintings would give more meaning to just a normal landscape and would make the nature in the background the main focus of the painting, while still including a human feature. Friedrich is now often seen as the most important painter of German Romanticism.

All of these images show how Friedrich made nature and landscape more important than the human aspect of his paintings. He included a lot more nature, with trees and rocks and sometimes old broken buildings and would only add one or two people to the painting who were almost admiring the nature around them and the sky above them. Whether it was the moon or the sunset.

Romanticism was an art form that rejected classicalism and focused on nature, imagination and emotion. Romanticism was an artistic, literary, musical and intellectual movement that originated in Europe. It began in 1800 and was very popular until around 1850.

Henry Fuseli

Fuseli’s was born in zurich in 1741 and died in London in 1825. His oil painting, The Nightmare, was one of the first Romanticism art pieces ever done. The painting shows a woman in deep sleep with her arms thrown below her, and with a demonic creature on top of her chest.

J.M.W Turner

J.M.W Turner, was an English romantic painter, printmaker and watercolourist, born in 1775 and died in 1851. He was and is still known for his expressive colouring and imaginative landscapes. His painting, Hannibal crossing the Alpes depicts the challenging efforts of Hannibal’s soldiers to cross the Alpes in 218BC. Turner created a dynamic balance of light and dark that recurred in his later works.

The sublime

The sublime is a western aesthetic concept of ‘the exalted’ of ‘beauty that is grand and dangerous’. It refers to the wild, unbounded grandeur of nature. The origin of the sublime could be related back to the publication of ‘A philosophical enquiry into the origin of our ideas of the sublime and beautiful’, by Edmund Burk. This book provided the English romantic movement with an analysis of what constitutes the sublime, and all the qualities it possesses.

Burk was born in 1729 and died in 1797. He had various political achievements including a whig MP and also the founder of modern conservatism.

I used artsteps to make a virtual gallery which shows some of my favourite photos I have taken.

https://www.artsteps.com/view/63623649b61bbf3c92d4699a