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.
