New Topographics (exhibition)

George Eastman House, Rochester, New York, where the exhibition was held in 1975 and 1976

"New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape" was a groundbreaking exhibition of landscape photography, held from October 1975 to February 1976 at the International Museum of Photography at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York. The show, curated by William Jenkins, had a lasting impact on aesthetic and conceptual approaches to American landscape photography helping to define the New Topographics genre. The exhibition brought together the work of Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Joe Deal, Frank Gohlke, Nicholas Nixon, John Schott, Stephen Shore, and Henry Wessel, Jr., who photographed the post-war American landscape, both built and natural. The subjects included parking lots, suburban homes, and coal mines, usually without people. Jenkins described the images as "neutral" in style, "reduced to an essentially topographic state, conveying substantial amounts of visual information but eschewing entirely the aspects of beauty, emotion, and opinion". Now regarded as one of the most important photography exhibitions of the twentieth century, it was restaged in its entirety as a traveling exhibition across the United States and Europe, beginning in 2009.

Influences

Jenkins drew directly on the work of Edward Ruscha, whose self-published artist books of the 1960s (26 Gasoline Stations (1962), Various Small Fires (1964), 34 Parking Lots (1967), and others) he admired for their deadpan, styleless treatment of mundane American subjects; Jenkins took the exhibition's title and its disengaged attitude from this example, although Ruscha himself was not included in the show. The exhibition's photographers also cited Eugène Atget and Walker Evans as influences, both of whom had recorded the built, vernacular landscape, Atget in turn-of-the-century Paris and Evans in Depression-era America.

The choice of the word "topography" also linked the show to nineteenth-century American survey photographers such as Timothy O'Sullivan and William Henry Jackson, who had documented the federal expeditions then opening the West.

Concept

In the catalogue introduction, Jenkins referred to the show's common thread as what he called "a problem of style", a "stylistic anonymity" that amounted to an apparent absence of style. Jenkins also presented the show as documentary rather than polemical, calling it in the catalogue a study "more anthropological than critical" that set out to record everyday lived experience as a cultural landscape shaped above all by commercial interests. Even so, several of the photographers, especially Robert Adams, Baltz, and Deal, brought a more ironic and critical eye to their subjects than the show's neutral framing suggested.

The exhibition

The photographers

For "New Topographics", William Jenkins chose eight young American photographers, Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Joe Deal, Frank Gohlke, Nicholas Nixon, John Schott, Henry Wessel, Jr., and Stephen Shore, together with the German couple Bernd and Hilla Becher. Jenkins organized the show in consultation with Deal, the museum's exhibitions manager.

The Americans' subjects ranged across the everyday built environment of the United States. Robert Adams photographed tract houses spreading across suburban Colorado, Lewis Baltz the new industrial parks of Southern California, John Schott the motels along Route 66, and Nicholas Nixon the buildings of downtown Boston. Frank Gohlke photographed grain elevators and their connection to the surrounding landscape, Joe Deal the suburban development spreading around Albuquerque, and Henry Wessel the everyday scenes of the American West, while Stephen Shore recorded ordinary American street scenes and was the only photographer to work in color.

From the late 1950s onward, the Bechers had photographed disused industrial structures across Europe and America. They presented the images in series they called "typologies", often arranged in grids under the heading "Anonymous Sculptures", a method that conceptual artists took up. The Bechers, the show's only non-American participants, came to it from a distinct German tradition: their objective, typological style drew on the 1920s New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit) movement, an unsentimental realism that rejected romantic idealism, exemplified for them by August Sander and Albert Renger-Patzsch.

Works and format

The exhibition comprised 168 photographs. All but Stephen Shore worked in black and white; his color photographs, the only color in the show, marked a break from the established belief that fine art photography belonged in black and white. About half the photographers used large-format 8 in × 10 in (20 cm × 25 cm) view cameras, with prints of roughly 20 cm × 25 cm (8 in × 10 in). Deal and Gohlke worked in square medium format, printing at 32 cm × 32 cm and 24 cm × 24 cm, while Baltz and Wessel used 35 mm, Baltz with Technical Pan, a slow, fine-grained Kodak film that he enlarged onto 8 in × 10 in paper. The Bechers printed larger, at the 30 cm × 40 cm then typical in Europe.

Reception

When "New Topographics" opened in 1975 it drew a lukewarm and divided response. Many viewers found its deadpan pictures of parking lots, tract housing, and industrial sheds dull or anticlimactic, reacting against the absence of the beauty and craft they associated with earlier landscape photography. Several of the participating photographers were uncomfortable with the "New Topographics" label, and Jenkins's description of the work as "neutral" and without style was contested by critics who saw implicit social and political meaning in the images. The photographer Frank Gohlke, one of the participants, later described the exhibition as "a vigorously hated show".

Legacy

See also: New topographics (photographic genre)

The exhibition's standing as a turning point emerged only gradually, and the shift it came to represent was barely perceptible at the time. Recognition built through the 1980s and 1990s; reviewing a new landscape exhibition in 1990, the critic Andy Grundberg described it as a successor to New Topographics, by then an established point of reference. The exhibition is now widely regarded as one of the most influential photography exhibitions of the twentieth century, both for its attention to the vernacular landscape and for its cerebral approach.

A notable element of the show was the artists' connection to higher education: most had studied in university programs, and many taught in them, a change from the preceding generations. The shift away from craft training and self-teaching had begun a generation earlier: in 1946 Ansel Adams established the first university department of photography, at the California School of Fine Arts, and passed the teaching there to Minor White. The New Topographics photographers came out of that academic world but turned away from the romantic, idealizing tradition of landscape photography that preceded them.

The 2009 restaging, and the scholarship that accompanied it, placed the exhibition within the systems theory then influential in American art. The critic Andy Grundberg and the historian Deborah Bright noted the work's kinship with Minimalism, in its austerity and its refusal of conventional aesthetic appeal, though Greg Foster-Rice argues that the deeper affinity was to a broader systems sensibility shared with the conceptual and serial art of the 1960s and 1970s. In this reading the photographers favored serial sequences over single images, plain visual arrangement over aesthetic composition, and pictures that stood as representatives of a larger system rather than as self-contained works. Robert Adams's The New West was organized as a serial progression across the Colorado Front Range in which no single photograph was meant to dominate; Joe Deal centered his subjects and removed the horizon by shooting downward, producing an even, pattern-like field; and Frank Gohlke kept a deliberately passive frame, as if laid over an existing scene without interpreting it. Jenkins underscored the point in the hang itself, crowding the prints in identical frames and breaking the rows with grids, including four Robert Adams photographs grouped in the manner of the Bechers.

The New Topographics photographers have been credited with a decisive influence on later generations working with human-altered environments. In Europe, the clearest connection runs through the Bechers. Their inclusion in the show carried their typological method to an international audience, and from 1976 their teaching at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf shaped the Düsseldorf School of Photography, whose serial, large-format work is associated with Andreas Gursky, Candida Höfer, Thomas Ruff, and Thomas Struth. The Bechers had arrived at their methods previous to the exhibition with the Düsseldorf School evolving from their own teachings. Their influence is reflected in the detached, deadpan aesthetic that the curator Charlotte Cotton has identified as the most prominent photographic style since the 1990s.

Later presentations

The exhibition was recreated in various locations: in 1981, six years after its original presentation, it was shown in reduced form at the Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol, UK, under the auspices of Paul Graham and Jem Southam. A large scale presentation of the exhibition was organized in 2009 at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson. "New Topographics" began an international tour in 2009, with stagings at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art presented the exhibition from July to October 2010. In 2011 the exhibition was on view at the Nederlands Fotomuseum in Rotterdam, Netherlands, and later at the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum in Spain.

External links

• New Topographics (Redux) Review of a rehanging of the original exhibition