New American Topographics

Introduction to the exhibit: New American Topographics

Fifty years ago (1975), William Jenkins curated an exhibit of 10 photographers for the Eastman International Museum of Photography in Rochester, New York. He titled the show New Topographics: Photographs of a Man Altered Landscape. All the photographs depicted landscapes that included tract homes, abandoned buildings, parking lots, and other human encroachments. He eschewed the romanticized idyllic view of landscape photography as exemplified by say Ansel Adams for what he called stylistic anonymity that was being expressed by a young generation of photographers including Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, and Stephen Shore, among others.

The show challenged the viewer with the simultaneous existence of harmony and discord, of beauty and ugliness (Adams). The critics of the day were puzzled by the apparent banality of the images seemingly devoid of emotion. The photographs seemed documentary and simple without the traditional notion of natural beauty. And yet, the exhibit inspired generations of others to follow this artistic path.

The New Topographics exhibit is now regarded as one of the most important photography exhibits in the 20th century. Britt Salvesen says that it was arguably the last traditionally photographic style and the first photo-conceptual style. And it continues to this day, a genre of photography with a wide array of practitioners. Larry Cusick and Richard Harrison are among those practitioners.

We regard the 1975 exhibit as a stepping off point to explore urban and rural landscapes with an eye for the accidental beauty in human artifacts embedded in the natural world. Robert Adams described beauty as another word for wholeness, meaning the elements of the frame come together to make a cohesive whole. With this point of view, beauty is all around us. We just need to look. And in looking we see. Then we photograph what we see.

There is the sublime in the liminal space. The abandoned building calls us. Its very austerity is its beauty. An empty parking lot pulls us in because it is a human presence with no human there. Roads and train trestles beckon us to imagine human intrusion of nature. The photographic image of a collection of tract homes is beautiful because it codifies the whole from the parts. As Robert Adams said, “No place is boring if you’ve had a good night’s sleep and a pocket full of unexposed film.”

A Photography Exhibit by Larry Cusick and Richard Harrison.

larry Cusick

Richard Harrison