New Topographies: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape” was a ground-breaking exhibition of contemporary landscape photography held at the George Eastman House’s International Museum of Photography (Rochester, New York) from October 1975 to February 1976.

Their photographs depicted the built environment, suburban sprawl, industrial structures, and the mundane aspects of daily life

The New Topographies photographers, including Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Frank Gohlke, Nicholas Nixon, and Stephen Shore, documented built and natural landscapes in America, often capturing the tension between natural scenery and the mundane structures of post-war America: parking lots, suburban homes, crumbling coal mines. The photographs, stark and documentary, are often devoid of human presence. Jenkins described the images as “neutral” in style, “reduced to an essentially topographic state, conveying substantial amounts of visual information but eschewing entirely the aspects of beauty, emotion, and opinion

What was the new topographies 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.