New Topographics is a style of landscape photography that focuses on the clash between the human world and the natural world.

It originated in the 1970s in America. Rather than focusing their cameras at the beautiful national parks of America such as Yosemite Valley, new topographic photographers instead took photos of the newly made, post-war, bleak and baron American suburbs. Photographers such as Nicholas Nixon, Frank Gohlke and Robert Adams were the pioneers of early new topographics (who were all featured in the 1975 exhibition “New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-altered Landscape”).

Robert Adams

Robert Adams was born in the 1930s in the city of New Jersey, but later moved to a town in the middle of the deserts in Colorado. This is where Adams would begin to take new topographic photos to show the wasteland towns hidden deep in America and how mankind has vandalised the beautiful, vast open landscapes of America.

Here is a good example of how Robert Adams expresses this distaste for the American town. In the photo, we see two boxy mobile homes on an empty street with empty driveways. The mobile homes block the view of a mountain in the background, and we can only see the top of it. This could be to demonstrate the point that these mobile homes that were flooding America at this time were useless and that they ruined the landscape. It could also imply Adams’ distaste for 1960s American suburb architecture. The homes of the time were very boxy and flat, and had no detail or personality, rather they appeared dull and lifeless.

Here is another example of Robert Adams’ work. In this photo, we can see in the foreground that there are, once again, boxy mobile homes. Although there are clear signs of life; there are cars in driveways and plants scattered outside homes, the image still appears lifeless. This is because of three things. Firstly, the image is in black and white and has no colour, which strips the image of any positive emotion. Secondly, the background is mostly empty and takes up half of the shot. Thirdly, the mobile homes in the foreground all look the same and appear very repetitive. The combination of all 3 implies a deeper message. The new wave of American suburbia is ugly.

Here is the final photograph by Robert Adams I want to show you. In this photo, we can see a distant large suburb that is bordered by a small road, and in the distance we see a tall mountain range reaching high into the clouds. It is important to note that the sky takes up the majority of the shot. Additionally, the mountains are clearly visible in this photo, rather than being hidden or covered by a boxy house or mobile home. Adams took this photo to show that, although these mass produced suburbs are very big, the natural world such as the mountains and the sky still tower over us. In his words, “Though the mountains are no longer wild, they still dwarf us and thereby give us the courage to look at our mistakes”. This is another reason why new topographics photos like to clash the natural and man-made world, to show that there is a more beautiful world outside of these repetitive and ugly towns, and that we are doing an injustice to the environment around us by creating these massive capitalist monstrosities.

Frank Gohlke

Frank Gohlke was born in the 40s in Texas. He later moved to Connecticut to study at Yale university, where he would meet two renowned photographers, Walker Evans and Paul Caponigro, who he would study the art of landscape photography with. In later years, he began to take new topographics photos in the south and west of America.

Here are a few examples of the photographs he took during this time. There are a few common themes in each of these photos. The most obvious one is emptiness. In these photos, there are no people. This is because Gohlke doesn’t want to portray these places as being urban and social, rather he wants the viewer to focus on the objects in the photos and what they truly demonstrate. Another theme is a focus on capitalism. In all of these photos, some form of capitalism is presented; cars, tourism, company logos on the smallest and the largest buildings. These photos are meant to be a demonstration of human greed. Additionally, in each of these photos at least a small piece of nature is present, however the nature is never the focus of the photo, instead it is hidden from the viewer in the reflection of windows or in the distant background. This is to show that mankind has become very detached from the natural world, and we have resorted to mass producing cities to confine ourselves from it. And the main drive for doing this has been capitalism. Businesses want their name as widespread as possible, seen by everyone, and a small area with millions of people, such as Los Angeles, is the perfect place to do that. Some of the money these businesses made was also then given to the city, which was then invested into building the city more and more. Frank Gohlke took these photos to show how detached people are from the reality of the natural world, and how mankind has completely neglected and converted the fight for survival in the wild into the fight for capital.

Summary

These new topographics works come from somewhere deep in the photographers heart. It is likely that they have watched the rapid growth of post-war American society as they grew up and how it has tainted and blinded the people into believing a false normal. These photographers understand that the natural world is much more powerful than the environments they have grown up in, and have demonstrated this emotion simply by displaying this new world in a single frame.

The main focus of new topographics is to demonstrate how mankind has altered the landscape to be perfect for us, but also to show how the development of this new world has blinded us from the beauty of the natural world.