New Topographics

Ansel Adams’ 1942 photograph “The Tetons and the Snake River” drew a collective gasp from the audience when the lights dimmed and Catharina Manchanda, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Seattle Art Museum, began her lecture on “New Topographics of Man Altered Landscapes.” 

“That’s exactly it!” Manchanda enthused, “That is exactly the point of this piece, its desired effect. There is a lyricism to this work. Adams has attempted to capture that moment of awe, and quite successfully as we’ve just experienced!”

There was a grand landscape tradition, she continued, one that informed the landscape paintings that predated photography and was adopted wholesale by the new medium as it emerged in the early nineteenth century. It prescribed framing, lighting, the adherence to the visual succession of fore, middle, and background. It insisted on communicating the virtue in wildness as a vehicle for awe. In other words, it was going for the gasp.

In Adams’ iconic shot of the Wyoming range the silver and sinuous Snake River winds from fore into middle ground. Flanked on both sides by heavily treed banks, the river is framed in such a way that it creates a distinct band in the foreground and again, after a sharp turn into the comparatively bare middle ground. Middle ground is delineated from background in the hard horizontal line of the river’s farthest bank. In the background stand the jagged, backlit Tetons capped by tempestuous skies. 

Manchanda advanced her slides to one of the photographs featured in the 1975 exhibition on which her talk was focused—New Topographics: Photographs of Man-Altered Landscapes. It was a work by Robert Adams (no relation to Ansel), “Tract House, Westminster, Colorado,” in which a camper trailer is parked in front of a dilapidated, aluminum siding clad building. A pronged television antenna reaches toward the top edge of the image. 

Some tittering rose from the audience. “Yes, I know!” Manchanda encouraged us, awkward laughter spreading as she continued advancing through a succession of mostly black and white photographs: urban streetscapes, suburban housing developments under various stages of completion, derelict mine shafts, the intersecting lines of a highway viaduct and its shadows. “Decidedly underwhelming, right?”

Yet Manchanda clearly respected her subject matter, and left it to do its work. The patience with which she left us to our evolution of reactions was masterful. As the slides progressed, the audience slipped into silence. I sat in the cross hairs of a strange combination of feelings: hard-edged distaste, a vague sense of despair, recognition. 

As I squirmed I tried to answer for myself, too simplistically, whether or not I liked the work. I didn’t, but why did it make me so uncomfortable? In the days that followed, I tried to name what lingered. 

The work of the New Topographers pointed at a loss of place, and at humans—Americans—as the agents of that loss. There’s a nauseating sense of culpability mixed with impotence, and there’s grief in the work that is hard to confront—hard to name, even. 

One visitor to the original 1975 exhibition—at which gallery attendants were tasked with collecting responses to the show—upon glimpsing his truck in a photograph, reflected, “At first they’re really stark nothing, but then you really look at them and it’s just the way things are. This is interesting, it really is.”

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I first encountered the work of the New Topographers as an art history major in a History of Photography course I took during my final college semester. My Alfred Stieglitz doppelgänger-fanboy of a professor was not the champion of this body of work that Manchanda is. He crammed in a dispassionate lecture at the close of the semester met by an equal dispassion from my colleagues and me, then promised us we wouldn’t be responsible for the material on the final exam. 

I’d forgotten about the New Topographers entirely when I walked into the Plestcheeff Auditorium at the Seattle Art Museum in February. I’d registered my attendance because the title—specifically the “Man-Altered Landscapes” bit—intrigued me. A few slides in and I began to recall the subject matter from that lecture years ago, to recognize the same superficial dislike of the photographs I experienced upon seeing them the first time. But Manchanda’s lecture captured me.

New Topographics was coined and curated by William Jenkins of the George Eastman House (whose namesake founded Kodak) in Rochester, New York. The show explored the objectivity possible with the photographic medium. The body of work was “neutral” according to Jenkins, “reduced to an essentially topographic state, conveying substantial amounts of information but eschewing entirely the aspects of beauty, emotion, and opinion.” 

The New Topographers claimed a journalistic approach, asking the viewer to form her own opinion of the content. “Modern photography had become known for stark black and white contrast and dramatic perspectives,” Manchanda wrote in an essay that accompanied a 2018 reinterpretation at the Seattle Art Museum of the 1975 original show at the Eastman House. Comparatively, “the New Topographics photographers had a decidedly quiet and descriptive approach.” 

That approach had an angle, though. The more recent exhibition description notes that the original 1975 show was an about-face where depictions of the American landscape were concerned. “Taken together,” it reads, “they posed questions about the ever-expanding sprawl of housing developments and the social and environmental implications of this unchecked growth.”

In a 2010 Guardian piece, photography writer Sean O’Hagan notes that the 1975 New Topographics exhibition was the moment in art history “when a certain strand of theoretically driven photography began to permeate the wider contemporary art world.” However unconcerned the New Topographers claimed to be about expressing opinions, notions of beauty, and emotions, their work nonetheless struck a clear note. O’Hagan writes, “These images of the ‘man-altered landscape’ carried a political message and reflected, unconsciously or otherwise, the growing unease about how the natural landscape was being eroded.” 

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A little context provides more clarity. The first half of the 1970s was marked by the loud ringing of environmental alarm bells. In 1970 Earth Day was celebrated for the first time, coinciding with the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency. In 1972 the chemical fertilizer DDT—called out by Rachel Carson a decade earlier in Silent Spring for its deleterious effects on raptor egg shells and by extension plummeting raptor populations—was banned. A year later the Endangered Species Act was passed. These were environmental wins, certainly, but at the same time harbingers of the crisis of place that has continued to unfold, inspire art, and demand action ever since. These were among our first collective reckonings with our negative impacts on the earth.

This reckoning quickly found expression in art. The American landscape is truly a many-splendored thing, But, the New Topographers communicated, to conflate the beauty found in the photography of Ansel Adams with the goodness of America is grandiose. 

So much is captured in the work of the New Topographers, so much commentary packed into the commonplace scenes paired with their oddly specific names. Whether or not they would claim an intention to moralize, history has made the point for them: what American culture can take credit for is captured in New Topography’s “stylistically anonymous” photographs—erasing any essential quality of place with an insatiable appetite for generic development.

And this is, of course, the reason New Topography has stuck with me in the month since I attended Manchanda’s lecture. The sum of the work points not only to the disruption of the land, but by extension my connection to it. It forces me to confront one possible future in which the landscape has been entirely scraped of its specificity. It asks me to acknowledge an underlying unease, collectively held.

Like most Americans, I imagine, I would prefer to think of this country as Ansel Adams saw it, not as Robert Adams did. But as art critic J.J. Charlesworth writes in the publication Tate Etc., “What no longer functions in the idea of beauty is the sense that it represents something of the value and importance of being human.” The work of the New Topographers challenges me to confront a growing conflation between what is human and what is ugly. It suggests humanity has some work to do to disassemble this connection, to find its way back to a healthy attachment to the land.

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It was the first time that photographers turned their lens on the American landscape in a non-celebratory way, documenting the reality of an exploitive and expansionist approach to what was still collectively thought of as the America of Ansel Adams. Their neutrality is, as far as I’m concerned, neither necessary nor convincing: their assessment is self-evident in what they pointed their cameras at. 

“A great photograph,” Ansel Adams considered, “is one that fully expresses what one feels, in the deepest sense, about what is being photographed.” By this metric, I find the work of the New Topographers successful, powerful. 

“You wouldn’t know you were here unless I told you,” it says to me. “We’re losing our connection to place—pay attention.” And I am.