New Topographics refers to a lineage of photography that records the man-altered landscape — suburban tracts, industrial parks, parking lots, graded land — in a detached, descriptive style. The term derives from the 1975 exhibition “New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape” at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York.
Photography that describes the man-altered landscape in a detached, matter-of-fact gaze stripped of emotion and heroism. Its subject is not sublime nature but the ordinary, changing land of suburbs, industrial zones, and urban peripheries.
What New Topographics inverted was landscape photography itself — from the celebration of sublime nature to the neutral description of land altered by people: not beauty or narrative but the traces of development, habitation, and industry inscribed in the land became the subject.
The term New Topographics derives from the 1975 exhibition “New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape,” held at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York. Curator William Jenkins brought together ten photographers — Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Joe Deal, Frank Gohlke, Stephen Shore,*4 Henry Wessel, and, from Germany, Bernd and Hilla Becher — whose pictures presented the ordinary built landscape of suburban tracts, industrial parks, and parking lots in an even, unemotional register.*1
This way of seeing was a conscious reaction against the tradition of sublime nature photography epitomized by Ansel Adams. Its makers avoided grandeur and personal expression, coolly describing how land is parceled, developed, and consumed. The photograph became less a beautiful view than something close to a topographic map for reading the traces left by habitation and industry.*2
The Bechers’ participation shows how the movement resonated across borders. Their typological method of frontally and repeatedly photographing water towers and blast furnaces was later carried forward by the Dusseldorf School of Andreas Gursky and Thomas Ruff, updating the matter-of-factness of New Topographics to large-format color scale.*3
Where the contemporaneous New Color photography brought everyday color into art photography, New Topographics questioned photographic neutrality itself through its choice of subject — the ordinary man-made land. Its deadpan style was at first sometimes read as indifference or coldness, but that restraint has since been revalued as precisely the method that makes the land’s transformation visible.*1
The descriptive gaze of New Topographics was widely inherited by later generations of landscape and urban photography. Takashi Homma recorded the Japanese suburb in Tokyo Suburbia, Frank van der Salm the cityscape and its infrastructure, and John Riddy architecture and urban space — each as restrained, serial description. Adjacent to the Dusseldorf School and Large-Format Color, it shares the same question: how to look at land that people have altered.*1
Dutch photographer and artist born in 1964 in Delft, based in Rotterdam.*1*2 Known for photography and video focused on the urban landscape, especially the pressures of …
Japanese photographer born in 1962 in Tokyo. Known for work on suburbs, contemporary urban life, family and domesticity, and later experiments with camera obscura and …
British photographer born in 1959. Known for serial color photographs of architecture, urban environments, skies, and built landscapes, often made through deliberate, sustained …
American photographer, born in 1937. Historical significance: he is important because he made the damaged West one of the defining subjects of late twentieth-century …
American photographer and visual artist, born in 1945 and died in 2014. Historical significance: he is significant because he helped redefine landscape photography as a study of …
American photographer, born in 1947. Historical significance: Shore is important because he helped shift color photography into the center of art-photographic discourse and …