New Topographics: “Photographs of a man-made landscape.

This term was created by William Jenkins as a way to describe a group of keen photographers who all had something in common, their photography, which all shared the same aesthetic of a black and white landscape prints which shared a site of interaction between human+ non human contact.

The group consisted of:

• Robert Adams
• Bernd and Hilla Becher
• Lewis Baltz
• Joe Deal
• Frank Gohlke
• Nicholas Nixon
• John Schott
• Stephen Shore
• Henry Wessel Jr. 

These photographers decided to ignore the beautiful landscapes the world has to offer, and instead pay attention to how easily and effortlessly man can alter them forever.

The topic of New Topographics was based on both built and natural landscapes in America, which highlighted the tension and difference between the natural scenery and the newly- built structures of post-war America.

“New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape” – This was a huge exhibition which commemorated the photographers and their creations, which also spread information and interest on the topic of urbanisation. The exhibition took place from October 1975-February 1976. It was held in Rochester, New York at the George Eastman House’s International Museum of Photography.

The photographs of the humanly altered landscapes mostly avoided any human presence- this was to that the images came across as, neutral in style, and focused mainly on the emotional, beautiful and opinionated visual information within.

Some examples of these altered lanscpaes are:

• Motorways
• Petrol stations
• Industrial parks
• Tract homes
• Car parks
• Suburban homes
• Crumbling coal mines

Frank Gohlke.

Born on the 3rd of April 1943, Frank Gohle was a photographer, he took photos of urban landscapes such as towns and old factories. Frank made a contribution to the New Topographics group and focused on the pure destruction and wreckage that urban areas faced due to natural causes. He took part in the New Topographics group and contributed He also stood out from different photographers because his photos captured the sheer destruction in urban areas from natural causes. An example of this is a tornado which struck his home town in Wichita Falls Texas, in 1979. I think his work perfectly ties into my work on the aftermath of Storm Ciaran as there was also a tornado that struck Jersey, and there was serious life- threatening weather conditions. Frank Gohlke is an especially important person in landscape photography, as well as being included in the New Topographics exhibition.

Examples of Frank Gohlke Photography.

I particularly like Frank Gohlke’s work because I think the black and white images particularly stand out, when it comes to New Topographics, due o the fact the bluntness and lack of emotion when the photos are black and white show the destruction and life taken out of the landscape and the emptiness from the wreckage.

My Frank Gohlke Inspired Photos.

Whilst taking photos at Harve Des Pas beach, I attempted to replicate and take inspiration from Frank Gohlke and his images whilst attemping to demonstrate the same fascination with the world’s constant growth, destruction and unexpected change, by featuring different machinery, industrialisation, littering and urbanisation. I think I was able to capture a more modern approach from the present day, comparing to Frank Gohlke’s work from the 1970s through to 2004. 

I plan to edit my photos in a way to show my inspiration from Robert and Ansel Adams. I will turn my images black and white and edit them further to show a more varied range of tones and shadows to create more depth and a dramatic affect.

Best Image Edits

Colour

Black and White

When editing these images I wanted to show my interest and inspiration from Ansel Adams and Robert Adams’ own style of editing. I aimed to have a high variety of tones and a lot of contrast within my images.

Overall Best Image & Analysis

I believe this is my best image out of my entire photoshoot. I really like the variety of tones and the general composition of the photo. The positioning of the camera gives the building intimidating industrial look, It leads the eye from the fence to the dark tower and sky. The textured surfaces on the building contrasts with the soft cloudy background combined with the natural lighting.

Overall I think this image shows my inspiration from the photographers I have researched the best because I’ve used a large tonal range and heavy contrast. I have also been able to captured plenty of textures and a variety of shapes in the buildings and clouds and kept a well balanced exposure.

I captured various landscapes across St Ounes Coast. One of the places was the sand dunes I thought this was an interesting landscape to capture because of the uneven formations and textures.

contact sheet

For this photoshoot I went into town to one of the car parks to try and how how this cliff has now been used and changed for us. Then I wanted to go to Fort Regent as I was trying to show overpopulation in jersey as it is quite a present issue for jersey and I thought the fort was a good place to do so as it is one of the highest points which looks into town.

The editing process

finished edits

between the sky and ground as in most of the images you can see almost a sharp line between the two which makes the town appear more dramatic and busy due to how calm the upper half of the pictures appear.

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

Photo plan

• Who – These photographs will focus on storm damage of the environment. Its effects on people will be shows through homes as opposed to showcasing people.
• What – I would like to photograph immediate damage such as fallen over trees and missing roofs but also how they are being worked on and fixed such as scaffolding and machinery.
• When – These photos will be taken when the weathers not so great and ideally bits of rain. This will be reflective of the storm and the negativity caused by its damage.
• Where – There will be a mixture of woodlands and housing estates to showcase a range of effects.
• Why – To document the storm which impacted peoples homes, educations, jobs etc. It was a major event which months later is still causing problems.
• How – These images will be landscape from a distance. I would like to try exposure bracketing for HDR on some which will require a tripod. I will take some without also where a tripod wouldn’t be usable or realistic. In terms of photoshop experimentation, I would like to try and layout a newspaper of sorts.

These are all images of immediate damage from the news. In addition the JEP has created many articles and covers surrounding the topic which I would like to take inspiration from for some image presentation. I would like to experiment with placing an image in a newspaper article or similar at some point.

Photoshoot 1

For this first photoshoot I took photographs of fallen trees since I will be focussing on houses in a second one. I visited St. Catherine’s woods since many tress had fallen or been recently chopped down for safety. I changed the images into black and white and adjusted the contrasts, highlights, shadows etc. I photographed individual trees and logs mostly instead of landscapes which I didn’t realise until selecting images.

Final Image

I believe that these this one turned out the best. There is greater contrast and the photograph shows a landscape instead of just a single tree like the others.

The New Topographics represented a radical shift by redefining the subject of landscape photography as the built (as opposed to the natural) environment. As environmentalism took hold of the public conscience in the 1970s, The old landscape photography from people like Ansel Adams, which where heroic and displaced the power of nature, where rejected in favour of how human activity connects with the natural world, rather than separating it. This means the truth of the natural world is captured, which making people understand the cruel impacts they are having on the world. 10 photographers pioneered this new way of landscape photography, and first displayed there photos in a small exhibition, in upstate NY, called new Topographics.

The Images they took showed the juxtaposition between humans and nature, and how we are constantly colliding with the natural world. They remind the viewers of the larger issue with our destruction towards the environment, as the heroic images of the natural landscape before often hid the truth. The celebration of nature continues to exist and photographer still try to capture the beauty of untouched nature. It is necessary for the causes of conservation.

Many people believed new topologies was the opposite of romanticism (anti-romanticism). Instead of trying to find the beauty in nature, by going to national parks for example, photographers of this exhibition tried to capture the by-products of Americas post war industrial expansion. Where the rise of urban sprawl and the reliance on cars are becoming a large worry.

the 10 photographers where Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Joe Deal, Frank Gohlke, Nicholas Nixon, John Schott, Stephen Shore, and Henry Wessel. They are tying to move away from a celebration of nature to a critique of humanity’s desire for expansion.

The image above is a very famous image from the new topographies. It has a very deadpan look, with nothing inherently interesting about it, due to its strait centre framing and blank lighting. Adams also had a very pessimistic tone towards this humans impact on the natural environment, trying to make the square and uniform mobile homes ugly in comparison to the smooth edged mountain top in the background. The harsh sun light reflecting off the mobile homes, with the dark and sinister background of a natural landscape, creates an obvious conflict between humans and nature. Many photos had basic composition, simple aesthetics and no beatification involved.

New topographics presents the American west being a landscape full of human developments, unlike how photographers of the pasted tried to present it as an untouched, beautiful piece of land.

Below are more examples of new topographics:

Introduction

When you think of “landscape photography,” what comes to mind?

Whatever pictures we typically imagining, they likely look different from the photographs in the 1975 exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-altered Landscape. 

Organised at the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, New York, the show featured ten photographers: Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Bernd Becher and Hilla Becher, Joe Deal, Frank Gohlke, Nicholas Nixon, John Schott, Stephen Shore, and Henry Wessel, Jr.

Anti Romanticism

The common theme throughout the exhibition was to examine the American landscape in a new way. Instead of focusing on pristine or exceptional scenery found at national parks, they focused their cameras on the byproducts of postwar suburban expansion: freeways, gas stations, industrial parks, and tract homes. They furthermore rendered these banal subjects with a style that suggested cool detachment. The opposite of the Romantic sublime Western landscape of the nineteenth century, or its twentieth-century photographic counterpart that can be seen in the work of Ansel Adams.

New Topographics represented a radical shift by redefining the subject of landscape photography as the built (as opposed to the natural) environment. The photographs were all images of non-idealised landscapes, a mundane American vernacular—sprawling repetitive suburban areas, highways, built environments, suburban sprawl, industrial structures, and the mundane aspects of daily life, that were taking place in the American landscape of the post- War 2

Neutral Style

New Topographics captured this man made landscape with a sense of objectivity and an almost scientific detachment.

In the exhibition’s catalog, curator William Jenkins described the photographs as

“neutral” and “reduced to an essentially topographic state, conveying substantial amounts of visual information but eschewing entirely the aspects of beauty, emotion, and opinion.”

“The New Topographic” photographers embraced a minimalistic and formalistic aesthetic, often employing straightforward compositions, deadpan perspectives, stark geometries, and a focus on the inherent qualities of the subject matter. Their images emphasized the formal aspects of photography, such as sharp focus, lighting, and clarity, which contrasted with the romanticized and subjective styles of the past.

Reactions

While visiting the exhibition, people voiced a range of reactions. 

“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.”

Preserved within these comments are the expectations these visitors held about the American. The sublime and idyllic landscapes they had come to know from photographers like Ansel Adams, were suddenly being overshadowed with a more truthful landscape.

Social Critique

What was both novel and challenging about New Topographics was not only the photographs’ content, but how they made viewers feel. By foregrounding, rather than erasing human presence, the photographs placed people into a stance of responsibility towards the landscape’s future—a position that resonated with ecology, the branch of environmental thought that was gaining traction in the 1970s.

Working in square format, Joe Deal photographed new homes and construction sites in Albuquerque, New Mexico from the steep foothills of nearby mountains. Eliminating the horizon from his pictures, he filled each square frame with a dense patchwork of surfaces: driveways, newly cut roads, empty lots, and expanses of brush yet to be tamed. The effect was that the terrain appeared compressed into flatness, encouraging viewers to study the photographs as if looking at topographical maps. Their eyes suspended in a state of scanning, viewers could read the landscape as bearing traces of human decision-making. Moments of too-perfect symmetry in the patterns of rocks and bushes expose the landscaping as unnatural. Traces of ongoing development in the form of construction sites are juxtaposed with piles of refuse and empty lots that suggest the wastefulness of abandoned projects. By framing the land in this way, Deal enabled his viewers to consider the cost of rapid growth in the fragile desert.

A closer look – Robert Adams

Robert Adams is one of the most important photographers of the post–World War II West. His images of the developing metropolitan sprawl define suburbanization in Colorado during the late 1960s and 1970s.

His concerned focus on the logged-over areas in the mountains and the bulldozed fields and ponds on the plains present the natural sacrifices made to the consumer culture of tract homes, housing developments, and shopping malls.

The photos capture the sense of peace and harmony that the beauty of nature can instill in us – “the silence of light,” as he calls it. But they also highlight our silent complicity in the destruction of that beauty by consumerism, industrialisation, and lack of environmental stewardship.

He captures the wonder and fragility of the American landscape. It’s inherent beauty juxtaposed with human’s impact on it.

In the photo Newly Occupied Tract Houses, Colorado Springs, 1968, Adams’ use of near/far is a powerful tool. With the nearness of the new excavation, the new scarring of the earth, contrasting with the sublime mountains beyond.

Adams does not intend to encourage judgements but suggest an uneasy coexistence. Photographed in the harsh light of the American West, the classical simplicity of the images illustrates Adams’s visual sense of fairness. Mountains and suburbs are treated with equal gravity and respect.

(Frame for a Tract House, Colorado Springs, 1969)

In other photographs houses become like fossilised dinosaur skeletons, their graves marked by ironic street names such as Darwin Pl. or multiply across the landscape, breeding like some genetically identical sequence.

In the photo ‘Mobile Homes’, Adams splits the Colorado landscape. On the top, we see the organic mountainscape, reminiscent of the sublime depiction of landscapes that we saw from people like Ansel Adams. In the foreground, this is contrasted with the geometric, sharp edges of the man-made mobile homes in the foreground that are highlighted with the harsh sunlight.

The organic edge of the background, contrasting with the angular edges of the foreground, creates and obvious conflict between man and nature.

The photograph makes a comment that the Colorado landscape isn’t the pristine wilderness that Ansel Adams captured, but it is now an interaction between human and nature due to urban sprawl .

The organic mountain-scape continues to frame Adams’s photo ‘Pikes Peak, Colorado’ (below). Here the artificial lights of the petrol station emerge from the mountain as if they are now permanently fused together.

The hazy, organic contour of the distant mountain ranges in Adams’ photos, appears more durable than the newly constructed neighborhood.

The sign blares out the name “Frontier”, exaggerating the division between man and wilderness.

Within these photos we see no or very few habitants. Isolated places and isolated people people living in a barren landscape being colonised and inhabited without much thought for the beauty or the destruction of the landscape.