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US Topographics: Imaging National Landscapes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 February 2020

CAROLINE BLINDER
Affiliation:
Department of English and Comparative Literature, Goldsmiths, University of London. Email: c.blinder@gold.ac.uk.
CHRISTOPHER LLOYD
Affiliation:
School of Humanities, University of Hertfordshire. Email: c.lloyd@herts.ac.uk.

Extract

In 1975, the New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape exhibition, organized by William Jenkins, at George Eastman House, changed the scope and aesthetics of American landscape photography. Ostensibly pared-back and banal, these black-and-white images formally presented the United States as a series of streets, suburban new builds, industrial sites and warehouses. None bigger than eleven inches by four or thirteen by thirteen, the photographs were also small and unassuming, refusing the grandness and potential sublimity of previous evocations of the US landscape. Rather than present the United States as a series of locations marked by regional and economic differences, photographers such as Robert Adams, Frank Gohlke, Lewis Baltz and Bernd and Hilla Becher now focussed on an increasing homogeneity across terrains, terrains often indeterminable in terms of actual locations, and, more often than not, eerily devoid of human presence. In Neil Campbell's words, the images were “unemotional, flat and appeared everyday, aspiring to ‘neutrality’ with a ‘disembodied eye.’” The New Topographics – according to such readings – differed from earlier depictions of the United States, moving away from the documentary focus on agrarian poverty and urban slums as seen during the Depression, as well as the humanist vision of postwar photographers such as Robert Frank. As William Jenkins put it in the original introduction to the exhibition, New Topographics was a study more “anthropological than critical,” one that would recentre everyday lived experience – not as a collection of individualized narratives, but as a cultural landscape marked by commercial interests above all.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press and British Association for American Studies 2020

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References

1 Campbell, Neil, The Cultures of the American New West (Chicago and London: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2000), 71Google Scholar.

2 Jenkins, William, “Introduction,” in New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape (Rochester: International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House, 1975), n.pGoogle Scholar.

3 Ibid.

4 Ibid.

5 Fox, William L., View Finder: Mark Klett, Photography and the Reinvention of Landscape (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2001), 43, 44Google Scholar.

6 Carmi, Ayelet, “Sally Mann's American Vision of the Land,” Journal of Art Historiography, 17 (Dec. 2017), 126, 17Google Scholar.

7 Foster-Rice, Greg and Rohrbach, John (eds.), Reframing the New Topographics (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2013)Google Scholar.

8 Giblett, Rod and Tolonen, Juha, Photography and Landscape (Bristol and Chicago: Intellect, 2012), 15Google Scholar.

9 Carmi, 15.