So what exactly was new about New Topographics?
Beech, Celena
Ansel Adams, El Capitan, Sunrise, Winter, Yosemite Valley, California, 1968
Until the 1970s, landscape photography consisted of showing an idealized landscape, the same landscape which had appeared in paintings for centuries, the land appearing a romantic wilderness.
Photographers showed the American West as the American Dream, a perfect vision of America, a vast natural landscape, vacant of human population and devoid of change.
The Re‐Photographic Survey Project
This was the beginning of a change in direction for landscape photography. The project drew upon the work of the Frontier photographers by showing the same scenes which they had photographed, but as they were found in the 1970’s. Concentrating on how these places had changed and no longer represented the perfect landscape. The photographers did everything that they could to enable them to take the photograph from exactly the same viewpoint.
Rephotographic Survey Project
Mark Klett was one of the main photographers; he went great lengths to make his work as similar as possible; using a 5 x 4 camera, Type 55 for raw edges and titling, hand‐written white text at the bottom of each photograph saying when and where it was taken.
The New Topographics Movement
A new generation of young landscape photographers came to be known as the New Topographics, so named
because of the references they made to the environment, maps and image making. They tried to show environments, which were not necessarily new but which people had ignored for a long time and so these were new landscapes to be captured through photography.
New Topographics were exploring a familiar land but in a new way, a younger generation, who went to see the National Parks photographed by Ansel Adams and found manmade changes; visitors, car parks, signposts for the tourists etc. Even this ideal landscape had been. Why should these new elements within the landscape be ignored? Why are they seen as less important?
New Topographics photographers attempted to raise our awareness of the green issues of the time, such as global warming and the effect we are having on the world in which we live. The New Topographics objective style always allowed the audience to draw their own conclusions.
There message was not obvious and confrontational, realizing that if things were going to change, it would be because people realized the consequences for themselves. Even the most barbaric human interventions in nature were treated as objectively as the photographers could.
Lewis Hine once said that he hoped to show what was wrong so that we would try to change it and what was right so that we could take comfort from it.
Robert Adams admits to trying to achieve these same goals; his photographs do not shy away from the traditionally celebrated areas of photographic art i.e. depicting beauty and form. But he does also include important issues.
Robert Adams, Southwest from the South Jetty, Clatsop County, Oregon, 1990
Robert Adams’ images show us how nature endures the influence of man. That it can grow back over what we have ruined, and so there may be hope for the future of mankind yet.
Lewis Baltz captures landscapes which are in between being industrial landscapes and returning to nature which would never have been considered important enough to be captured in a photograph before.
Lewis Baltz, Prospector Village, 1977
Baltz also looks at the ironies in the architecture we have created such as blocked passages, opaque windows, and ambiguous signage and lights turned on in the day.
It was in the 1970s when the art world finally accepted photography as a form of fine art, 130 years after its birth. This was thanks to the work of the New Topographics movement, which received the support of the federal government who endorsed photography as a fine art.
Bernd and Hilla Becher, Industrial Facades 1980
Photography was now being shown in major East coast galleries that had only ever shown paintings, sculpture and graphics. One such example is that the Sonnabend Gallery, who began to represent the work of German duo Bernhard and Hilla Becher. Castelli too signed on Robert Adams and Lewis Baltz.
When the work of these photographers was brought together in 1975, William Jenkins, the curator of the George Eastman Gallery summed up the objectivity of the movement;
“The photographs of course are not objective, this was more a political gesture than a theory, and they were desperate to be seen as different to the sentimentality of American popular photography. The photographs are about man exploiting the landscape and the visual potential of a damaged land. They recognized beauty in a manmade world and gave the ordinary a new pastoralism. They show a broken land in a visually interesting way so could be seen as objective because of that, but I would say instead that the movement is ambivalent.”
Thomas Barrow
As mentioned earlier on, time was a very important element in the work of New Topographics, one person who showed this extremely well is Jacques‐Laurent Aarsman. He photographs sub‐events which we usually take for granted and ignore but when captured in a photographic image become much more interesting and make you begin to wonder what else you might have missed by not looking at things in this way. One photograph shows a half completed road running under a bridge, under that half which is not yet complete a farmer has taken the opportunity to store his bales of hay.
Hans Aarsman
New Topographics did not approve of the use of devices, which make more interesting photographs; they produced straight photographs to document what was there. They did not agree in changing things in the landscape as it falsified the whole image, for example they would never have considered sandwiching a negative of a beautiful sky onto their image that might not have any detail there.
It amazes me how many photographers have never heard of the New Topographics movement, despite their importance as a chapter in the history of photography. Without them landscape photography would still be idealizing the landscape.
Landscape, fashion and editorial photographers alike have adopted the way in which they look at objects. Their outlook has also influenced the work of other genres of photography as it showed that more objective, possibly confrontational photography was becoming more acceptable.
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