The New Topographics Redux
William L. Fox
Lewis Baltz (United States, b. 1945), Jamboree Road between Beckman and Richter Avenues, Looking Northwest (detail). From the series New Industrial Parks, 1974, gelatin silver print, 6 x 9 in., gift of the photographer, George Eastman House collections © Lewis Baltz.
This fall the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) has re-mounted most of the 1975 exhibition that forever changed the way we look at landscape photography, The New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape. That show was originally mounted by curator Bill Jenkins at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, and it brought together artists who were forcefully redirecting our attention from landscapes that sought to exclude evidence of humans from the picture--think Ansel Adams--to an unflinching regard for what humans were doing to nature. Robert Adams’ photographs of the bland suburbs outside Denver, Lewis Baltz’s austere industrial parks of Orange County, and the deadpan view of industrial structures by Bernd and Hilla Becher were standouts.
Jenkins, a distinguished photo historian who now teaches at Arizona State University in Tempe with Mark Klett, among others, is weary of being identified with that single show, but he captured an important moment in photography, and a crucial one in art and environment. The fact that our own major photo collection is called The Altered Landscape, which includes work by those photographers, is a reflection of the importance of Jenkins’s show.
Walking through the LACMA re-staging was a reminder of the Great Acceleration that occurred post-WW II, that hyper-bubbling of homes and automobiles and appliances that altered our world so severely that its surface can now be defined as human artifact as much as a collection of natural landforms. I never saw the original New Topographics show, and what surprised me most about the LACMA presentation was the uniformly modest appearance of images, many of them 8 x 10-inch black-and-white prints. The photographers were working in a deliberately understated fashion, an allusion to the documentary appearance of the work done in the mid- and late-nineteenth century by Timothy O’Sullivan and others.
We’re now more used to a photographic confluence of geography and art like that assembled a few years ago at the San Jose Museum of Art by our own curator, Ann M. Wolfe. Suburban Escape: The Art of California Sprawl included work by topographical artists such as Lewis Baltz; it also demonstrated where such work had progressed: the photographs had gotten larger, shifted into color, and the theme had been picked up by painters and video artists, among others.
Center for Land Use Interpretation, Permian Basin Oilfield, from Texas Oil: Landscape of an Industry
LACMA acknowledged the evolution by commissioning a new piece from the Center for Land Use Interpretation(CLUI), an organization that for the last several years has been mounting a series of shows about the oil industry in America. Two immense screens hung high in a darkened gallery next to the photographs displayed “landscan” videos taken above the Houston Petrochemical Corridor in Texas and the South Belridge Oil field in Kern County, California. The looping videos were made by gyro-stabilized cameras flown at low altitude over the landscape, and were accompanied by a deep droning soundscape by noted musician and soundtrack composer George Budd.
The epic "zombie-fication" of the landscape presented by CLUI validates just how prophetic the small but intense views of the New Topographers were as they were being made in the 1960’s and ’70’s.
Next: Mark Klett & Byron Wolfe: Charting the Canyon
Lewis Baltz (United States, b. 1945), Jamboree Road between Beckman and Richter Avenues, Looking Northwest (detail). From the series New Industrial Parks, 1974, gelatin silver print, 6 x 9 in., gift of the photographer, George Eastman House collections © Lewis Baltz.
This fall the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) has re-mounted most of the 1975 exhibition that forever changed the way we look at landscape photography, The New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape. That show was originally mounted by curator Bill Jenkins at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, and it brought together artists who were forcefully redirecting our attention from landscapes that sought to exclude evidence of humans from the picture--think Ansel Adams--to an unflinching regard for what humans were doing to nature. Robert Adams’ photographs of the bland suburbs outside Denver, Lewis Baltz’s austere industrial parks of Orange County, and the deadpan view of industrial structures by Bernd and Hilla Becher were standouts.
Jenkins, a distinguished photo historian who now teaches at Arizona State University in Tempe with Mark Klett, among others, is weary of being identified with that single show, but he captured an important moment in photography, and a crucial one in art and environment. The fact that our own major photo collection is called The Altered Landscape, which includes work by those photographers, is a reflection of the importance of Jenkins’s show.
Walking through the LACMA re-staging was a reminder of the Great Acceleration that occurred post-WW II, that hyper-bubbling of homes and automobiles and appliances that altered our world so severely that its surface can now be defined as human artifact as much as a collection of natural landforms. I never saw the original New Topographics show, and what surprised me most about the LACMA presentation was the uniformly modest appearance of images, many of them 8 x 10-inch black-and-white prints. The photographers were working in a deliberately understated fashion, an allusion to the documentary appearance of the work done in the mid- and late-nineteenth century by Timothy O’Sullivan and others.
We’re now more used to a photographic confluence of geography and art like that assembled a few years ago at the San Jose Museum of Art by our own curator, Ann M. Wolfe. Suburban Escape: The Art of California Sprawl included work by topographical artists such as Lewis Baltz; it also demonstrated where such work had progressed: the photographs had gotten larger, shifted into color, and the theme had been picked up by painters and video artists, among others.
Center for Land Use Interpretation, Permian Basin Oilfield, from Texas Oil: Landscape of an Industry
LACMA acknowledged the evolution by commissioning a new piece from the Center for Land Use Interpretation(CLUI), an organization that for the last several years has been mounting a series of shows about the oil industry in America. Two immense screens hung high in a darkened gallery next to the photographs displayed “landscan” videos taken above the Houston Petrochemical Corridor in Texas and the South Belridge Oil field in Kern County, California. The looping videos were made by gyro-stabilized cameras flown at low altitude over the landscape, and were accompanied by a deep droning soundscape by noted musician and soundtrack composer George Budd.
The epic "zombie-fication" of the landscape presented by CLUI validates just how prophetic the small but intense views of the New Topographers were as they were being made in the 1960’s and ’70’s.
Next: Mark Klett & Byron Wolfe: Charting the Canyon
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