New Topographics
A deadpan landscape approach that pictures human-altered places with crisp, matter-of-fact clarity.
New Topographics refers to a mode of landscape photography shaped by the exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape (International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House, Rochester), curated by William Jenkins. The show framed a shift away from the picturesque and the idealized nature celebrated by earlier masters, toward a cool accounting of built interventions and environmental change. Emerging from the late 1960s and early 1970s climate of postwar consumer culture, accelerated suburbanization, and unchecked development, it treats the landscape as evidence of how people occupy, reorganize, and wear down the world. The approach also revives the descriptive ethos of nineteenth-century survey photography, in which terrain was recorded to be known, mapped, and archived rather than romanticized.
In practice, New Topographics favors a neutral, stark, and often minimalist look. Photographers use straightforward viewpoints, rigid geometries, and an emphasis on the subject’s inherent surface and structure, frequently choosing sites that seem overlooked or aesthetically "unattractive": parking lots, tract housing, industrial parks, motels, and the disfigured edges of cities. Images commonly omit people, emphasizing traces of human presence and the placeless atmosphere of modern infrastructure. Large-format view cameras were often used to produce maximum sharpness and descriptive detail, with prints commonly kept modest in scale to avoid a heroic, monumental address. While much of the work is associated with black-and-white clarity, color also appears within the approach.
The term is frequently linked to Conceptual art for its suggestion that photographs can function as information or typologies rather than expressive masterpieces. It is also defined in opposition to the sublime, emotionally charged modernist landscape tradition. New Topographics is often discussed alongside snapshot-driven social landscape photography for its attention to the everyday, but it more often relies on a distanced, methodical, tripod-based approach, and it connects to European "objective" traditions through figures such as Bernd Becher and Hilla Becher.