 Subjects -> PHOTOGRAPHY (Total: 20 journals)
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- From ‘Topographic’ to ‘Environmental’ – A Look into the Past and
the Presence of the New Topographics Movement
Authors: Gisela Parak
Abstract: Forty years after its inauguration, the 1975 George Eastman House exhibition New Topographics – Photographs of a Man-Altered landscape is generally considered as legendary. Moreover, one talks of a New Topographics movement. How did the show become the myth it is today? Who are the protagonists that keep this movement alive? This essay argues the New Topographics’ legacy and claims that next to the style that curator William Jenkins has identified as ‘topographic’ to summarize the photographers of the New Topographics exibition , it was the topic of a ‘man-altered landscape’ that resonated in all other parts of the world. Based on the exhibition Landschaft. Umwelt. Kultur. On the New Topographics’ Transnational Impact and a symposium held on 30 October 2015 at the Museum für Photographie in Brunswick, Germany,1 this essay explores how the ideas of the New Topographics disseminated transnationally and merged with the emerging environmental conscience at the end of the 1970s. Furthermore, parallel or roughly at the same time, a flourishing of photographic methods of presenting landscape and nature in a more timely matter originated in Germany, France, and in the Netherlands. This essay suggests that after forty years of critical landscape depiction, the ‘topographic’ approach was dissolved by an ‘environmental’ understanding of landscape representation.
- Whispers and Cries: Photographic Evocations of the Anthropocene
Authors: Suzaan Boettger
Abstract: This paper addresses the ‘problem of style’ that curator William Jenkins declared at the beginning of his catalogue essay on the New Topographics was ‘at the center of the exhibition’. It argues that rather than being ‘anthropologically’ detached, the New Topographics’ emotional reserve was a style. Its approach was consistent with contemporaneous New York painting and sculpture’s rejection of 1950s’ Abstract Expressionism’s emotional drama and allusive non-objectivity. Fusing 1960s’ Pop Art’s attention to mundane commodities and Minimalism’s reductive cubes, the New Topographics focused on geometric form and high contrast clarity applied to generic modernist suburban buildings. Yet their rejection of pictorial conventions of landscape in favour of environments strongly constructed by humans disrupted the ideal of nature as respite. Their banal urban and suburban landscapes featuring arrays of blocky factories and industrially manufactured residences present an early, implicit evocation of the Anthropocene. That work can then be recognized as a precedent to a prominent subject matter among current photographers of more overtly displaying our geological era’s disproportionate impact by humans on natural ecologies in images emphasizing the scale and extent of extraction, construction, consumption and waste.
- On Both Sides of the Ocean – The Photographic Discovering of the
Everyday Landscape. Analyzing the Influence of the New Topographics on the
Mission photographique de la DATAR
Authors: Raphaële Bertho
Abstract: The influence of the American photographers represented in the now famous New Topographics exhibition (1975) on the orientation of European photographers from the 1980s is regularly presented as obvious, particularly in the context of the famous Mission photographique de la Délégation à l’Aménagement du Territoire et à l’Action Régionale (DATAR: Delegation for Territorial Planning and Regional Action, 1984-88). This statement raises some important historiographical questions on the conditions and the nature of this transnational relationship. It should be examined how and why a visual reflection on the North American territory, grounded in the New World’s own history and mythology, was also applied to the Old World. In order to develop a reflection on the relationship between two different periods and cultural areas, this essay moves in concentric circles, by analyzing the very nature of these two photographic moments, their relationship, their inclusion in a photographic history and more widely in the visual representation of the territory.
- New ‘Masters’ of Dutch Landscape. Photographs of the Most
Man-Made Land in the World
Authors: Maartje van den Heuvel
Abstract: This article discusses the impact of the now legendary 1975 exhibition at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York: New Topographics. Photographs of a Man-altered Landscape on photography in the Netherlands in general, and specifically with regards to the 2008 traveling exhibition Nature as Artifice. New Dutch Landscape in Photography and Video Art. It begins by going into several aspects of the Dutch landscape itself as well as the country's strong tradition of landscape painting. Together, these two elements make the context of landscape photography in the Netherlands rather unique. The article then examines the evolution of a new landscape photography, with photographers and their projects grouped according to characteristics previously encountered in the photography of the New Topographics. By defining similarities and differences between photographs of the New Topographics and Nature as Artifice, the author will arrive at conclusions to her enquiry concerning whether the earlier exhibition in any way influenced the latter, and if so, in what way(s) this influence occurred.
- Symposium review: From a ‘Topographic’ to an ‘Environmental’
Understanding of Space at the Museum für Photographie, Braunschweig (30
October 2015)
Authors: Seyed Abolfazl Shobeiri
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