New Topographics In the United States landscape and wilderness photography had been genuinely embraced by both art practitioners and cultural gatekeepers alike. Ansel Adams stands as prime example The New Topographics exhibition provided the public with an update on the settlement process of the American West A common mistake occurs in identifying the New Topographics exhibition exclusively as a response to landscapes of the American West.
1975 exhibition: New topographies: Photographs of a Man Altered Landscape (at George Eastman House International Museum of Photography, Rochester NY) Little indication at the time that it would leave such impression on the world of landscape photography The show arrived on time with significant change in the world of photography, art and theory. The academic institutions had begun to respond favourably towards critical photography, photographers begun to adapt the climate. The tradition in landscape photography had worked in set line of direction, operating in iconic picturesque and sublime modes, like Ansel Adams works from national parks.. Preferred visual language existed. Instead, it provided a new generation of photographers with a style that set them apart from the established order of landscape photography. For Lewis Baltz, the style of the photo document gave the appearance that it had no author.
With Adams s photographs, its national parks and wilderness, America could have its conservationist cake and eat its nature cake as well. In other words, it could conserve vast tracts of wilderness whilst ruthlessly exploiting nature everywhere else.!! The New Topographics exhibition embodies the period of American photography when its practitioners became overtly aware of the photograph s artifice and construction. Up to this point the main subjects of popular landscape photography, especially the frontier regions of the American West, had been consistently presented within a narrow aesthetic range, most commonly as picturesque and sublime Tolonen
What I argue for is that this deferment of the subject that occurs in a lot of the New Topographic work is an important part of a process of withholding judgement, not as an end in itself, but for the sake of providing a space in which we can better contemplate the complex trajectory of contemporary life, especially as we find ourselves increasingly buffeted by economic, social and environmental forces that are seemingly beyond our control. Tolonen
Ten photographers took part in the original 1975 exhibition: Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Joe Deal, Frank Gohlke, Nicholas Nixon, John Schott, Stephen Shore and Henry Wessel.!! A new revised version of the show, travelling globally from 2009 to 2012, includes the work of Ed Ruscha. His recent inclusion into the New Topographics exhibition recognises an important precedent to the collective work in the original show.
Robert Adams
Robert Adams
Frank Gohlke
Bernd and Hilla Becher
Stephen Shore
During this time, as photography and its relationship to truth was questioned, along with the project of modernity, rather than exploiting the medium through augmentation and spectacle, and emphasising its artifice, the photographers of the New Topographics stylistically went the other way.. They seemed to intentionally complicate the medium and the emerging critical arguments by pursuing the manufacture of images that appear excessively neutral and objective.
Turning to the documentary form (and fiction) of the medium provided a new group of landscape photographers with some traction to achieve this aim. They could be described further as neutral, indifferent, objective, dull, ambiguous, flat, cool, detached and bland. settled into the everyday and mundane. Paradox of the pictures as (Salvesen, 2009: 37) notes is that they are both boring and interesting.
The very minimalism and ambiguity that the work in the exhibition shared allowed it to serve as a tabula rasa on which a variety of interpretive perspectives would be inscribed over This is one of the qualities of the exhibition that has allowed it to remain on the cultural radar for so long.
The post-war economic boom provided for increasing middle-class prosperity. And as the middle-class expanded the American suburb became the dominant feature in the landscape. They focussed on the landscapes that were a direct consequence of the successful implementation of the American dream.
Bright is tired of the mythical landscape traditions in cinema and photography that compose landscapes within simple geographic or aesthetic categories. Although New Topographics is seen as a challenge to landscape traditions, Bright sees the exhibitors work as succumbing to alternative aesthetic forms and neutering any potential for the development of the practice of landscape in photography. She calls for a new type of landscape photography that overtly reveals the political conflicts embedded within all landscapes. Deborah Bright: Of Mother Nature! and Marlboro Men! An Inquiry Into the Cultural Meanings! of Landscape Photography
Bright effectively sees the New Topographics as a missed opportunity to open up an imagery that has social criticism and political revelation as its reason to existence.. New Topographics photographers turned to the form, or style, of the document to provide a clearing, whereas Bright retains faith in the political and revelatory power of the photo-document as a way to transform the genre of landscape photography. For Bright, the focus on form is a dead end, reducing the potential to expose the networks of power that are essential to any landscape
These photographs of man-altered landscapes forestalled nostalgia and prevented an escape into the past instead, they forced viewers to remain in the present and think about the future. New Topographics had redemptive aspects in its renovation of landscape photography, attention to cultural landscape, and depiction of heedless land use. Its key message is not revelation but responsibility. Tolonen
In the 1960s, Ed Ruscha more or less reinvented the artist s book. By turning away from the craftsmanship and luxury status that typified the livre d artiste in favor of the artistic idea or concept, expressed simply through photographs and text, Ruscha opened the genre to the possibilities of mass-production and distribution. In Real Estate Opportunities, Ruscha presents, without comment, pictures of various tracts of land for sale in different parts of L.A. County.
Lewis Baltz (born September 12, 1945) is a visual artist and well known photographer who became an important figure in the New Topographic movement of the late 1970s. His work is focused on searching for beauty in desolation and destruction. Baltz images describe the architecture of the human landscape, offices, factories, and parking lots.[2] His pictures are the reflection of control, power, and influenced by and over human beings. His minimalistic photographs in the trilogy Ronde de Nuit, Docile Bodies, and Politics of Bacteria, picture the void of the other. [ vague ] In 1974 he captured the anonymity and the relationships between inhabitation, settlement, and anonymity in The New Industrial Parks near Irvine, California (1974)
http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/video/ tateshots-lewis-baltz
Mark Ruwedel
Mark Ruwedel on New Topographics https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0_uc-jlgl4!
Liza Lewentz
Mitch Epstein: American Power