The term New Topographics was coined by William Jenkins in 1975 to describe a group of American photographers whose pictures had a similar banal aesthetic, in that they were formal, mostly black and white prints of the urban landscape.

This Technique in which a scene—usually a landscape—is photographed as if it were being surveyed from afar, practiced most famously by the 1970s ‘New Topographics’ photographers, including Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Nicholas Nixon, and Bernd and Hilla Becher.

Robert Adams

Robert Adams was born on May 8, 1937 (age 87 years), City of Orange, New Jersey.

Robert Adams is an American photographer who has focused on the changing landscape of the American West. His work first came to prominence in the mid-1970s through his book The New West and his participation in the exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape in 1975.

For 50 years, Robert Adams (b. 1937) has made compelling, provocative, and highly influential photographs that show us the wonder and fragility of the American landscape, its inherent beauty, and the inadequacy of our response to it. This exhibition explores the reverential way he looks at the world around him and the almost palpable silence of his work.

Many of these photographs of the American West capture the sense of peace and harmony that the beauty of nature can instill in us—“the silence of light,” as he calls it, that he sees on the prairie, in the woods, and by the ocean. Other pictures question our silent complicity in the desecration of that beauty by consumerism, industrialization, and lack of environmental stewardship. Divided into three sections—The Gift, Our Response, and Tenancy—the exhibition features some 175 works from the artist’s most important projects and includes pictures of suburban sprawl, strip malls, highways, homes, and stores, as well as rivers, skies, the prairie, and the ocean.

While these photographs lament the ravages that have been inflicted on the land, they also pay homage to what remains.

Lewis Baltz

Lewis Baltz was born on September 12, 1945, Newport Beach, California, United States. He died on November 22, 2014 (age 69 years), Paris, France

Lewis “Duke” Baltz was an American visual artist, photographer, and educator. He was an important figure in the New Topographics movement of the late 1970s. His best known work was monochrome photography of suburban landscapes and industrial parks which highlighted his commentary of void within the “American Dream”.

Parking lots, suburban housing and warehouses were all depicted with a beautiful stark austerity, almost in the way early photographers documented the natural landscape. An exhibition at the International Museum of Photography in Rochester, New York featuring these photographers also revealed the growing unease about how the natural landscape was being eroded by industrial development.

Stephen Shore

• Foreground vs background | Dominant features
• Composition | low horizon line | Square format
• Perspective and detail / cluttering
• Wide depth of field | Large Format Camera
• Colour | impact and relevance
• Nationalism vs mobility vs isolation
• Social commentary | The American Dream ?
• An appreciation of the formal elements : line, shape, form, texture, pattern, tone etc

Technical

• Slow Shutter Speed, car on the left is slightly Blurry
• Natural light is being used, Cold Clinical feel, distinct Hard-Edged shadows

Visual

• Hard Distinct Edges within the environment, Text, Shapes, Horizon
• Some alignment to the Rule of Thirds
• Horizon is quite low, Composition feels cluttered or closed

Contextual

• 2 Sides of Life, Urbanization and Industrialization
• Cars connected all places together
• No one cared about the Impact that the Petrol stations and Cars would have on the environment
• Celebration of Transport/freedom but Damaging
• Red, White, Blue colours being used connected to the American Flag in California – Nationalism
• Logical image but Cold and stericle, makes sense in the Head but truthfully hurts to look at in the Heart

Conceptual

• Car creates a sense of Freedom from escaping the Cluttered space and sent off into the Horizon