What does Topographic mean?
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
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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.