New topographics (photographic genre)
New Topographics is a style of urban landscape photography that emerged in the United States during the mid-1970s. The genre is characterized by a detached, straight photography approach to human-altered landscapes. Photographers in this movement reject the romantic and sublime qualities of earlier landscape photography, such as that of Ansel Adams, and instead focus on the commonplace, banal, and industrial features of the contemporary environment.
While the term was coined by curator William Jenkins in 1975 to characterize the photographs he selected for the exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape at the George Eastman House, it has since been used to describe an ongoing photographic movement. The genre has influenced subsequent generations of photographers both in America and internationally, shaping contemporary approaches to urban, suburban, and industrial landscape photography.
Characteristics
New Topographics photography is characterized by a neutral, matter-of-fact aesthetic. In the exhibition catalog, curator William Jenkins described the photographs as "neutral" and "reduced to an essentially topographic state, conveying substantial amounts of visual information but eschewing entirely the aspects of beauty, emotion, and opinion.”The subject matter typically includes the built environment—such as tract housing, industrial sites, parking lots, and infrastructure—often portraying suburban sprawl, warehouses, strip malls, and motels in unromanticized, detached views. Dramatic lighting and composition are avoided in favor of a "deadpan" approach that underscores human-altered landscapes without an emotional influence.
Legacy
The New Topographics movement has left an indelible mark on contemporary photography, shaping how photographers approach the landscape and built environment both in America and abroad.Contemporary "Post-Industrial" and "Social Landscape" Work
acknowledged the influence of New Topographics photographers like Stephen Shore and Nicholas Nixon on his landmark work Sleeping by the Mississippi, despite his divergence from their approach by emphasizing emotional content. Joel Sternfeld's American Prospects embodied what curator Kevin Moore called "the synthetic culmination of so many photographic styles of the 1970s, incorporating the humor and social perspicacity of street photography with the detached restraint of New Topographics photographs and the pronounced formalism of works by so many late-decade colorists."The movement's focus on human transformation of the land also fed directly into environmentally engaged landscape photography. Richard Misrach's series Desert Cantos, documented military bombing ranges, petrochemical pollution, and ecological disruption across the American Southwest, extending the New Topographics concern with the man-altered landscape into explicitly political and ecological territory. Mitch Epstein's American Power, a five-year survey of energy production sites across twenty-five states, has been analyzed as deriving its aesthetic from the New Topographic tradition while applying it to questions about the energy infrastructure and addressing environmental justice. Exhibitions such as the Cincinnati Art Museum's Human-Altered Landscapes have placed original New Topographics photographers alongside subsequent practitioners including Misrach and Edward Burtynsky, charting the movement's continuing influence on how photographers document human transformation of the land.