New topographic photography was a technique that was predominantly black and white landscape images which were being taken as if it was being surveyed from afar. New topographic was a term made by William Jenkins in 1975 to describe a group of American photographers. This included Robert Adams and Lewis Baltz and they all had a general name to describe them all as one because their photography had a similar banal aesthetic, they were mostly black and white images of urban landscapes. However Stephan Shore was the only topographical photographer who took his images in colour.

The new Topographic was a reflection of the increasingly suburbanised world around them and a reaction of the tyranny of idealised landscape photography that elevated of the natural and the elemental.