New Topographics

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"New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape" is the title of an exhibition that epitomized a key moment in American landscape photography. The show was curated by William Jenkins at the International Museum of Photography at the George Eastman House (Rochester, NY) in 1975. It had a rippling effect on the whole medium and genre, not only in the USA, but in Europe too where generations of landscape photographers emulated the spirit and esthetic of the exhibition. Since 1975 "New Topographics" photographers such as Robert Adams, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Frank Gohlke, and Stephen Shore have influenced photographic practices regarding landscape around the world. Moreover, and as a proof of the impact of this exhibition beyond the American scene, three out of the ten photographers in the show were later commissioned by the French government for the Mission de la DATAR.

For “New Topographics” William Jenkins selected eight then-young American photographers: Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Joe Deal, Frank Gohlke, Nicholas Nixon, John Schott, Stephen Shore, and Henry Wessel, Jr. He also invited the German couple, Bernd and Hilla Becher, then teaching at the Art Academy of Dusseldorf (Germany). Since the late 1950s they had been photographing various obsolete structures, mainly post-industrial carcasses or carcasses-to-be, in Europe and America. They first exhibited them in series, as typologies, often shown in grids, under the title of "Anonymous Sculptures," and were soon adopted by the Conceptual Art movement — they are currently the only photographers exhibited at the Dia Beacon, a vast space dedicated to conceptual art in Beacon, NY. Each photographer in the New Topographics exhibition was represented by 10 prints. All but Stephen Shore worked in black and white. The prints were in a 20 cm x 25 cm (8"x10") format except for Joe Deal (32 cm x 32 cm), Frank Gohlke (24 cm x 24 cm – close enough to 8”x10”), and the Bechers with typical European (for the time) 30 cm x 40 cm prints.

In his introduction to the catalogue, Jenkins defined the common denominator of the show as "a problem of style," "stylistic anonymity", an alleged absence of style. Wishful thinking at the time if we now look at the stylistic following that the show generated. Jenkins mentioned Edward Ruscha's work, especially the numerous artist books (“26 Gasoline Stations” (1962), “Various Small Fires” (1964), “34 Parking Lots” (1967),… ) that he self-published in the 1960s as one of the inspirations for the exhibition and the photographers it features (except the Bechers).

"The pictures were stripped of any artistic frills and reduced to an essentially topographic state, conveying substantial amounts of visual information but eschewing entirely the aspects of beauty, emotion and opinion,." "[...] rigorous purity, deadpan humor and a casual disregard for the importance of the images." Much can be said now of such declarations that may sound slightly over-exuberant, if not naive. Technically, half the photographers were working with 8"x10" (20 cm x 25 cm) large format view cameras; those who were not were using either square medium format (Deal, Gohlke), or in the case of Lewis Baltz 35 mm Technical Pan, a slow and high-definition film manufactured by Kodak that the photographer printed on 8"x10" paper. Only Schott and Wessel were actually using regular 35 mm cameras and film. In any case all prints showed signs of printing mastery. Another interesting element in the show was that everyone was, or would be, linked with higher education either as students or professors, both in most cases, a definite change with the preceding generations. The paradigm shift from craft or self-teaching to academia had somewhat been started by photographers such as Ansel Adams and Minor White, but the new generation was drastically turning away from the photographic tradition they stood for (ARAT transcendentalism, ARAT standing for “Another Rock, Another Tree,” or esoterism in White’s case). This move was clearly illustrated by the subject matter that the New Topographics chose as well as their commitment to casting a somewhat ironical or critical eye on what American society had become. They all depicted urban or suburban realities under changes in an allegedly detached approach. In most cases, they revealed gradually themselves as coming from rather critical vantage points, especially R. Adams. L. Baltz, J. Deal.

"New Topographics", some thirty years after its opening still remains an exhibition of great impact and influence on western landscape photography, an influence that even extended to Japanese landscape photography (see Naoya Hatakeyama’s work for instance) and whose long-term effects can even be identified in contemporary Chinese photography.