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New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-altered Landscape

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. They decided to not focus on the pristine features of sceneries like national parks, instead, they focusses on suburban places such as freeways, gas stations, industrial parks, and tract homes.

What was it a reaction to?

The New Topographics was a reaction to 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. Overall, it was the opposite of what Ansel Adams and Edward Weston had created which was landscape photography focussed solely on nature where no people/man-made structures were present. It emphasized the relationship between man and nature by brining them together to show manmade landscape with the addition of nature. Many of these photos are in black and white and are of urban areas. One characteristic of many photos is to be empty. using black and white really works with this idea since the simplicity of the shades are simple and there isn’t an over contrast of colours involved making the image feel hollow. this will then be accompanied by nature in some way

The New Topographics was inspired and taken by the expedition called “New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape,” which was mounted in 1975 by William Jenkins. It then became popular and signalled a radical shift away from the traditional depictions of landscape.

In this photo, you can see its a good example of an empty feeling photo. The clouds are very faint making the sky blank with one shade of lighter grey. i think this works well as taking a shoot when the weather is looking more like a storm would further fill up the image taking away the emptiness and adding more aspects into the image. the image is an example of a desolate street without the presence of human life, this allows the viewer to simply focus on the manmade houses which in this case would be the large house which takes up a large portion of the image.

The naturalistic part of the image would include the grass, fields and trees in the background and finally the large mountain in the background.