Topographic is a way of describing images which have this similar banal look to them. And in most of the phots they contain both nature and built structures however the nature in them is not like how you would see it in maybe romantics. Usually in topographic the plants appear to be muted no colourful flower or super green grass its normally kind of muted.
where did it start
These images tend to really contrast romanticism paintings which wasn’t much before this as this style grew popular in 1975 due to a exhibition called “Photographs of a Man-altered Landscape” where they were changing from more classical and stereotypically beautiful nature landscapes and moved more towards how people have changed our natural environment using both the good and the bad. This exhibition held by William Jenkins was said to have held 10 artists work around topography’s and they were Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Joe Deal, Frank Gohlke, Nicholas Nixon, John Schott, Stephen Shore, and Henry Wessel.
The Oxbow, View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm- Thomas Cole
Mobile Homes– Robert Adams
The main idea of this style of photography is a reaction to the war that had taken place in America and how it was effecting people the war effected people in many ways it ruined their economy for a while people were having top work too many hours just to be able to afford their basic necessities all because of inflation. There was then a very big and sudden rise of the population they were having too many people having children at one time. Then also because of everything that had happened the rise in mental health problems was big so many more had ptsd and so many more due to the war being split up from your family maybe family dying.
William Jenkins
William Jenkins is one of the most influential people in term of the topic of new Topographics he was the one who created the photography exhibition calledNew Topographics: Photographs of a Man-altered Landscape. This art show didn’t actually have the best reviews at the time it came out people were confused. These are said to be some things said about the exhibition at the time
“I don’t like them—they’re dull and flat. There’s no people, no involvement, nothing.”
“At first it’s stark nothing, but then you look at it, and it’s just about the way things are.”
“I don’t like to think there are ugly streets in America, but when it’s shown to you—without beautification—maybe it tells you how much more we need here.”
Ansel Adams (born February 20, 1902, San Francisco, California, U.S.—died April 22, 1984, Carmel, California) was an American photographer who was the most important landscape photographer of the 20th century. He is also perhaps the most widely known and beloved photographer in the history of the United States; the popularity of his work has only increased since his death. Adams’s most important work was devoted to what was or appeared to be the country’s remaining fragments of untouched wilderness, especially in national parks and other protected areas of the American West. He was also a vigorous and outspoken leader of the conservation movement. While photography and the piano shared his attention during his early adulthood, by about 1930 Adams decided to devote his life to photography. Adams believed that photography could give vent to the same feelings he experienced through his music. His first attraction to photography came from his love of the natural landscape and a yearning to capture something of that overwhelming experience on film.
He is renowned for his Western landscapes eg his views of Yosemite and the Sierra Nevada. His photographs emphasise the natural beauty of the land. These images are often seen in black and white using the zone system which Ansel Adams and Archer created. There were 10 zones in Ansel Adams’ system. They were defined to represent the gradation of all the different tonal values you would see in a black and white print, with zone 5 being middle grey, zone 0 being pure black (with no detail), and zone 10 being pure white (with no detail).
Ansel Adams honed his vision for his photographs through a process called visualisation. Visualisation requires the photographer to take in a subject without a camera and imagine how the final photo will come out. Ansel Adams described it as “the ability to see the scene you photograph and recreate in your mind the print you will produce”. Meaning see your developed image, relying on the information you receive from the scene and on your developing intentions.
Group f/64 was created when Ansel Adams and Willard Van Dyke, an apprentice of Edward Weston, decided to organise some of their fellow photographers for the purposes of promoting a common aesthetic principle. The group was formed in 1932 and it constituted a revolt against Pictorialism, the soft-focused, academic photography that was then prevalent among West Coast artists. The name of the group is taken from the smallest setting of a large-format camera diaphragm aperture that gives particularly good resolution and depth of field. The original 11 members of Group f.64 were: Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, Edward Weston, Willard Van Dyke, Henry Swift, John Paul Edwards, Brett Weston, Consuelo Kanaga, Alma Lavenson, Sonya Noskowiak, and Preston Holder.
Though members of the group represented a wide range of subject matter in their work, they were united in their practice of using the camera to record life as it is, through unmanipulated “pure” documentation. Works associated with Group f.64 include Adams’s dramatic images of Yosemite National Park, Edward Weston’s close-up, high-detail photographs of fruits and vegetables and of sand dunes and nudes, and Cunningham’s studies of calla lilies.
Ansel Adam’s photographs link to romanticism. He used a black and white film in his images and would photograph a variety of different landscapes eg mountains, lakes and hills. The black and white film he added to his images differentiated his work from other photographers as he manipulated his photographs to create a darker sky, making the once blue, comforting sky into something terrifying and mysterious. He casted chilling shadows over the landscapes he photographed which made his scenes look more unnerving. This is an example of romanticism as he managed to create pictures that would leave people in awe but also slightly terrified by his dark ominous sky.
Photo analysis:
For this image, Ansel Adams used a small aperture (f/64). He did this as it allowed him to capture small details from the environment and let these details be seen in his photographs. This small aperture also made his images clearer. This image clearly displays the zone system as you can see shades ranging from pure black (0) to pure white (10). When taking this photograph, he first used a yellow filter and then used a red filter. He noticed that the type of filter that he used changed how the image looked (with the red filter making the photograph look more like how the environment did in real life and enhancing the tonal range of the image). From this, Ansel Adams came up with the idea of visualisation, which allowed him to show in his image what he saw in his ‘minds eye’. He used his talent in photography to take these pictures of different natural landscapes to which he then used these images to try and persuade the government to not destroy these beautiful places. Overall, I like how this photograph looks as you can see lots of detail and texture on the mountain and the manipulated sky which has been darkened gives the image a more intense, scary feeling but is also beautiful at the same time. This image successfully portrayed the idea of romanticism.
Ansel Adams Inspired Photoshoot:
For this photoshoot, I took pictures of various natural landscapes. I ensured that I took an equal amount of vertical and portrait photographs in order to get more variety in my images. To edit them, I used photoshop and edited the levels, curves and made the images black and white, adjusting the different colours to make the blue sky more darker as seen in Ansel Adams images. This dramatic dark sky makes my images look more scary, successfully portraying the theme of romanticism. I mainly focused on mountains and cliffsides as this is what Ansel Adams typically took pictures of.
Overall, I like how my images came out as I think they have a good tonal range in which you can see shades from pure black to pure white. Additionally, my images also have good detail and clarity. If I were to do this photoshoot again, I would try take more photos in different whether conditions eg fog as I think this would help my images look more creepy, furthering the idea of romanticism in my work.
Edward Weston
Edward Henry Weston was an American photographer. He has been called “one of the most innovative and influential American photographers” and “one of the masters of 20th century photography.” He was born in 1886 and died in 1958. He is best known for his carefully composed, sharply focused images of natural forms, landscapes, and nudes. Edward Weston was born in Highland Park, Illinois. He began to make photographs in Chicago parks in 1902, and his works were first exhibited in 1903 at the Art Institute of Chicago. Three years later he moved to California and opened a portrait studio in a Los Angeles suburb. In 1902, Weston received his first camera for his 16th birthday, a Kodak Bull’s-Eye #2, and began taking photographs. Weston’s first photographs captured the parks of Chicago and his aunt’s rural farm.
Edward Weston was instrumental in establishing an identity for the West Coast school of photography in the early years of modernism in America. His eloquent combination of expansive landscapes and other natural subject matter with precise, unembarassedly technique created a prototype for the f/64 group’s purist style. Most of his work was done using an 8-by-10-inch view camera.
Through his promotion of straight photography and his daybooks, in which he recorded his artistic growth, Weston helped cement photography’s place as a legitimate modern artistic medium and influenced an entire generation of American photographers.
Robert Adams (born May 8, 1937) is an American photographer who has focused on the changing landscape of the American West. His work first came to prominence in the mid-1970s through his book The New West (1974) and his participation in the exhibition New Topographics of a Man-Altered Landscape in 1975.
Adams grew up in the suburbs of Colorado and in 1956, he shifted to South California to study English literature at University of Redlands. In 1965, he did his Ph.D., from University of Southern California, in the same subject.
Adams has worked on American West landscapes for more than 38 years, covering Oregon, Colorado and California. He uses his camera to express his love for landscapes. Also, to understand how industrial and urban growth has transformed it.
Adams bought a 35mm camera and began to take pictures mostly of nature and architecture. He soon read complete sets of camera work and aperture at the Colorado springs fine arts centre. He learned photographic technique from Myron Wood, a professional photographer who lived in Colorado. While finishing his dissertation, he began to photograph in 1964. In 1966, he began to teach only part-time to have more time to photograph. He met John Szarkowski, the curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, on a trip to New York City in 1969. The museum later bought four of his prints. In 1970, he began working as a full-time photographer.
The New West
In a seminal series of images representing the suburban southwest, Adams shows the brutal squalor of suburban architecture and its effect on the landscape, as well as the hopeful aspects of nature that are beyond our impact.
Image Analysis
In this image there are man made buildings and structures with the natural scenery of mountains in the background. The man made structure and the natural scenery blend in together seamlessly, as there isn’t much change in tones of black and white, the mountain and the top of the buildings wouldn’t have much between them on the zone system while the sign that is lit up is much lighter and standing out more than the structures (man made and natural) in this image. The beauty of this picture is the fact that the petrol station is something that would be seen as ‘basic’ and it is something you see in everyday life. Their is a clear retro vibe in Adams images which is what I really like and find unique within these images, for example the lighting and electrical wires wouldn’t typically be the same in todays modern world, they are something you wouldn’t typically take pictures of but the idea of making something ugly and neglected and transforming it into a pleasant and interesting image is something Adams was clearly very good at.
This image is different to the first one. You can see a clear change in scenery from the top to bottom as there is a mountain in the top background and buildings at the bottom front. In this image it is easy to say there is signs of poverty and a suburban lifestyle. This is because Robert Adams liked to take these kinds of pictures where there is a ‘poor quality’ life with a beautiful, natural environment contrasting behind it. The homes look like they would not be secure and it looks like an indecent place to live, this conflicts to the mountain and hills behind where the mountain looks strong and bold unlike the homes that look poor quality and strategically placed whereas the mountains natural curves and soft corners don’t match with the man-made structures.
New Topographic can be represented as a radical shift by reanalysing the subject that surrounded landscape photography as a fabricated environment.
It is Technique in which a scene, usually a landscape, is photographed as if it were being observed from afar. this was practiced most known by the 1970s ‘New Topographic’ photographers which included Robert Adams, Nicholas Nixon, Lewis Baltz, and Hilla Becher.
What is Topographic a response to?
The images that were beautifully printed of the mundane but strangely fascinating topography showed both the reflection of the world that was becoming massively suburbanised and also a reaction to the tyranny of idealised landscape photography that elevated the natural and the element.
America struggled with a lot post-war.
Things like,
Inflation and labour unrest. The main economic concern the country had was the immediate post-war years was inflation.
The baby boom and suburbia. Because of the millions of people that died, returning veterans made up for lost time and got married and started a family.
Isolation and splitting of the family unit, pharmaceuticals and mental health problems
Vast distances, road networks and mobility
More
Many photographers associated with the topic ‘New Topographic’ were artists like Robert Adams, Nicholas Nixon, Hiller Becher etc…
New Topographic was inspired by the likes of Albert Renger Patszch and the notion of New objectivity.
Places like Parking lots, suburban housing and warehouses were all portrayed with a beautiful distinct strictness, almost in the same way that early photographers documented natural landscape. An exhibition in the International Museum of Photography in Rochester, New York features these photographers that revealed the growing apprehension about how natural landscape were being engulfed by industrial development.
The New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit) was constructed as a style in Germany in the 1920s as a challenge to Expressionism. As seen on the name , it offered a return to unsentimental reality and a focus on world that was objective, instead of the more romantic and abstract,or idealistic likelihood of Expressionism.
Robert Adams is an American photographer who has focused on the changing landscape of the American West. His work first came to prominence in the mid-1970s through his book The New West and his participation in the exhibition New Topographic: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape in 1975.He looked at aesthetically pleasing photos. He was an environmentalist and usually photographed landscapes and natural enjoinment – similar to Ansel Adams, however they have no relation to each other. 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.
Adams quotes- “I think if you placed me almost anywhere and gave me a camera you could return the next day to find me photographing. It helps me, more than anything I know, to find home.” This shows us his passion of taking photograph’s and his passion for it.
Typologies
A system used for putting things into groups according to how they are similar : the study of how things can be divided into different types. Eg photographing farm houses- multiple of them as a collective group.
Robert Adams uses Typologies’.
The making of Typologies – Robert Adams
Robert Adams is a photographer who has documented the extent and the limits of our damage to the American West, recording there, in over fifty books of pictures Adams grew up in New Jersey, Wisconsin, and Colorado, in each place enjoying the out-of-doors, often in company with his father. He was a very successful photographer and had many different exhibitions , making good money and becoming a very well known photographer , he was best known for his images of the American West. Adams’s black-and-white photos document the changes wrought by humans upon nature. Adams began to take photography seriously, learning techniques from professional photographer Myron Wood. In the 1970s, he was released the book The New West (1974), and a year later was included in the seminal exhibition “New Topographic”. Therefore making this a new big thing, still used today. Today, his works can be found in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others. Adams has become one of the most profound photographer’s in history and he did make history within his photographer’s.
A photographic typology is a study of “types”. That is, a photographic series that prioritizes “collecting” rather than stand-alone images. It’s a powerful method of photography that can be used to reshape the way we perceive the world around us, such as photographing buildings and certain types of windows as a collective and done in a group.
Typologies
A system used for putting things into groups according to how they are similar : the study of how things can be divided into different types. Eg photographing farm houses- multiple of them as a collective group, many of which Adams did use.
What was the new topographic a reaction to?
The stark, beautifully printed images of the 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.
What is the meaning of New Topographic?
New topographic 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.
Robert Adams
Robert Adams is an American photographer who has focused on the changing landscape of the American West. His work first came to prominence in the mid-1970s through his book The New West and his participation in the exhibition New Topographic: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape in 1975.
He looked at aesthetically pleasing photos. He was an environmentalist and usually photographed landscapes and natural enjoinment – similar to Ansel Adams, however they have no relation to each other.
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.
The photographs, stark and documentary, are often devoid of human presence. Jenkins described the images as “neutral” in style, “reduced to an essentially topographic state, conveying substantial amounts of visual information but eschewing entirely the aspects of beauty, emotion, and opinion”.
On the one hand, New Topographics represented a radical shift by redefining the subject of landscape photography as the built (as opposed to the natural) environment. To comprehend the significance of this, it helps to consider the type of imagery that previously dominated the genre in the United States.
Photographers involved
The New Topographics photographers were Robert Adams, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Lewis Baltz, Joe Deal, Frank Gohlke, Nicholas Nixon, John Schott, Stephen Shore, and Henry Wessel Jr.
I edited these photos using Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom Classic, with inspiration from the storm as I thought I could take photos of the damage that has been caused to nature. I edited these photos to be black and white, as I think they create more emotion towards viewers. I think I could’ve improved this photoshoot by taking clearer photos that has one subject, instead of a few as they would’ve then looked neater and not as chaotic.
