Robert adams was a photographer who documented the damage to the American West, including the extent of it and its limitations. He created over fifty books of pictures, which included both despair of the environment and also hope. his goal as he said “is to face facts but find a basis for hope.” Adams grew up in New Jersey, Wisconsin and Colorado, and enjoyed the outdoor environment with his Father in each of them. When he was twenty-five he was a collage English teacher, and that is when in his summers off he picked up photography, After spending time with his wife in Scandinavia he realized that there were complexities in American geography.

His work

Within the 1970’s and 80’s he produced a series of books which included- The New West,Denver,What We Brought,Summer Nights- which focused on expanding suburbs along Colorado, books that portrayed the need to development but also the surviving light of the natural world. He also examined humanity’s footprint and nature’s resilience in the wider western landscape. Adams has occasionally published smaller, sometimes more personal volumes. These have included a prayer book set in the forest (Prayers in an American Church). He has sometimes directly engaged civic and political issues as well. A series of photographs at the Ludlow memorial, for example, speaks for organized labor, and another at a protest against the second Iraq war records the suffering that accompanies empire. 

Image analysis

Adams has used natural daylight when taking this image, which manipulates the intensity of the sunlight reflecting against the ground. It also looks as if the image is a bit over-exposed, in order to manipulate the burning oil smoke to be as dark as possible compared to its surroundings to show its intensity, and how much damage it is creating. This photo is sharp and in focus, and has a sharp tonal range, using different shades of grey and linking them to emotions. He has laid out the image within a way that the damage to the environment is right in our face while still capturing the environment trying to fight back against this man made damage, he has done this by creating a depth of field where the destruction is right in our faces, but the beauty is surrounding it, we see this when the bug black burning oil smoke is right in our faces, making it very hard to miss, but there is a small tree standing very still to the left of the destruction. His image also relates to a political context, where people were fighting for the burning of oil to be calmed down or stopped all together, this relates to the 1973 oil crisis.

What is it?

New Topographics 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. Unlike their predecessors, these new “topographic” photographers (such as Robert Adams) were less concerned with portraying an ideal image of nature and were more interested in showing plainly how man has altered it

Who are they?

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.

What was the new topographics a reaction to?

Their stark, beautifully printed images of this 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.

Artist reference – Robert Adams

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. While Adams was teaching English at Colorado College, he began taking pictures of nature and architecture with a 35 mm reflex camera, and learned photographic technique from the professional photographer Myron Wood. His earliest series The New West (1968–1971) depicts the uniform housing tracts that were part of suburban development in Colorado.

New Topographic mood board

The New West

The New West is a photographic essay about what came to fill it—freeways, tract homes, low-rise business buildings and signs. In five sequences of pictures taken along the front wall of the Colorado Rocky Mountains, Robert Adams has documented a representative sampling of the whole suburban Southwest.

Frank Gohlke

Frank Gohlke was raised in Wichita Falls, Texas. He received a B.A. in English Literature from the University of Texas at Austin in 1964 and an M.A. in English Literature from Yale University in 1966. While at Yale, Gohlke met photographer Walker Evans, and in 1967 and 1968 he studied with the landscape photographer Paul Caponigro.

Between 1971 and 1987, Gohlke made his home in Minneapolis, and has resided since in Southborough, Massachusetts. He has taught photography at Middlebury College; Colorado College; Yale University; and the Massachusetts College of Art.

Gohlke is the recipient of two Guggenheim Foundation Fellowships, a Fulbright Scholar Grant, and two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts; as well as grants from the Bush Foundation, the McKnight Foundation, and the Gund Foundation. He has also received commissions from the Wichita County Heritage Society and the Texas Historical Foundation.

Gohlke′s photographs have been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Cleveland Museum of Art; the Minneapolis Institute of Arts; the Amon Carter Museum; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. In 1975, he was included in the influential exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-altered Landscape, organized by the International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House. His photographs are held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House; the Canadian Center for Architecture; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Amon Carter Museum; and the Walker Art Center.

Storm damage

For this task, over half term i decided to go on a drive around jersey and take photos of storm damage. i visited parks, fields, estates, small lanes and football pitches. These are some of my best images:

I like this photo as it shows the roots of the tree that have been pulled out of the ground. This represents how strong the storm was to physically pull a tree out the ground.

These two images are very similar. I like these pictures because the grass is eye catching along with the neutral colours of the tree and sky/background. I like how they both have standing trees in the background to show the variation of how the storm affected these areas.

This image shows the raw reality of how the storm has damaged the island. It almost tells a story amongst the storm and how people had to deal with this experience.

This image is one of my bests. I love how gloomy the picture looks, it really brings out the horrifying experience everyone went through during the storm.

I love this image as the contrasts of the different colours draws you in.

Landscape images