Red River Valley History Conference

This week Friday I will presenting some of my research on the New Topographics at the Red River Valley History Conference. At the encouragement of Bill Caraher I decided to submit an abstract for the conference. It was accepted and further filled my already over full plate. Oh well, it really has taken only a few days to merge the research into an acceptable format for the conference.

The paper proceeds with a brief overview of the New Topographic photographers and their work. It then transitions to set the group within an art, and particularly photo historical context. It then turns to the social science of Human Geography to explore the disciplines simultaneous emergence and focus on topics of place/space. Within that group of scholars I mention the work of Edward Relph to explore ideas of placelessness that may function as a subtext embedded within the work of the New Topographics. I then turn to several contemporary photographers to explore how these shared tendencies have continued on. All this within 20 minutes.

The highlight of the conference is the keynote address given by Dr. Robin Jensen on "Living Water: Rituals, Spaces, and Images of Early Christian Baptism."

Check out the conference schedule here...or here.

Catholicity and the New Topographics

Its been a while since I have made any more posts on the New Topographics. Due to a time crunch lately I have been rather sparse in my posting. Today I did want to share links to three great papers on the New Topographics.

Of Mother Nature and Marlboro Men
Deborah Bright's classic post-modernist and feminist essay pursues and critiques the New Topographics for failing to make a clear social comment, as well as the art world, for reducing their work to sanctified art objects. She easily dismisses their "objectivity" and demands that they are part of a 1970's social context that was well aware of a burgeoning ecological movement that certainly would seem to influence their work in some fashion. She challenges landscape photographers to acknowledge the dynamic relationship between cultures and the landscapes they inhabit by looking ideas of zoning, security, private and public spaces, retail spaces rather than an escapist or colonialist perspective.


Landscape and the West: Irony and Critique in New Topographic Photography
This second paper is by Kelly Dennis who interacts directly with Bright's essay but pushes upon the ideas of irony and its use (or lack thereof) in American culture and actual use or clear understanding with the visual arts (save Conceptual art).


Landscape, Geography, and Topographic Photography
This third paper, by Liz Wells, discusses the changes in topographic photography and how we understand the role and truthfullness of the image. Here her work looks towards the photographic methodology as a photographer as researcher.

Catholicity and New Topographics VI

(Parking Lots, 21, - Ed Ruscha)

A quick glance at Ed Ruscha’s work and his lineage with the New Topographics is obvious. Ruscha transcends clear definition as an artist working between painting and photography, often considered a force within the conceptual movement. And yet Ruscha considered himself a hobbyist photographer. Ruscha has claimed the two most prominent photographic influences upon him were Walker Evans and Robert Frank’s The Americans.[1] Influenced by Evan’s “dead pan documentary vernacular subjects and Frank for his grainy improvisational style”[2] Ruscha set out searching for his own voice which soundly emerged in the 1960’s. Ruscha obsessed with signage and building design, an ever present attraction to the same subjects all filtered through a wry sense of humor.

Ruscha’s work can be filtered in a number of ways but becomes most connected to the New Topographics when interpreted through studies of the readymade and topography.

In 1963 Ruscha visited a Marcel Duchamp retrospective at the Pasadena Art Museum reinvigorating his interest in the common object or readymade. That same year, Ruscha published the first of many small photographic books, inspired by Frank’s The American’s. His forty-eight page Twentysix Gasoline Stations offers a reconsideration of Duchamp’s concept of the readymade reinterpreted through his interest in architecture. Twentysix Gasoline Stations were cheaply printed in a mass production, non-narrative style which mirrored the subjects utilitarian architecture.

Ruscha carried this serial interest in specific topics and non-descript books into an investigation of the California landscape with the releases of Some Los Angeles Apartments (1965), Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966) (#10), and Thitryfour Parking Lots in Los Angeles (1967) (#11-14). The second in this series images random, utilitarian architecture of the 50’s and early 60’s through what could have easily been seen as images for realtors or surveyors.[3] For the third in the series, Ruscha mounted the camera to a car and drove the length of the sunset strip, recording every building at noon to reduce shadow heightening the banality of the image. The book was then released as an accordion-like fold out with the images all connected. For the fourth release he addressed another formal concern more directly in terms of style. Ruscha hired the commercial photographer Art Alanis to capture the vast expanses of asphalt parking lots surrounding malls, stadiums and drive-in theatres. He had already experimented using others to shoot the gas-stations in 1963. But this is an advance in that step at the depersonalization or style-less style, something that would influence many of the New Topographics. William Jenkins goes into great detail about Ruscha’s influence upon this group saying,
“The pictures were stripped of any artistic frills and reduced to an essentially topographic state, conveying substantial amounts of visual information but eschewing entirely the aspects of beauty, emotion, and opinion. Regardless of the subject matter the appearance of neutrality was strictly maintained…There is an obvious visual link between Ruscha’s work and the pictures shown here. Both function with a minimum of inflection in the sense that the photographers’ influence on the look of the subject is minimal…The exhibitors also share subject matter with Ruscha, picturing, almost without exception, man made structures within larger contexts such as landscapes. ”[4]

Ruscha’s influence upon the group can hardly be underestimated. Many of the snippets discussed above: neutrality, style-less style, seriality, the readymade all become prominent aspects in the work of the New Topographics and their descendants.

[1] Sylvia Wolf, Ed Ruscha and Photography, (Gottingen, Germany: Steidl, 2004), 20-21.
[2] Wolf, 21.
[3] Wolf, 129
[4] Jenkins, 5.

Catholicity and the New Topographics V

(U.S. 285, New Mexico, 1955 - Robert Frank)

Most commentators general pick up on two primary photographic influences when speaking of the New Topographics: Robert Frank and Edward Ruscha. Much has been said about Ruscha’s influence upon the group, though quite obvious, it has also historically been guided by Jenkins’ who goes to great lengths in the catalogue to argue for the groups’ connection to the work of Ruscha. Less, however, is said about the groups lineage to Frank. Though, Lewis Baltz, one member of the New Topographics group, has said in an essay that the group took “Robert Frank as their mentor and the snapshot as their vernacular model.”[1]



Certainly Ruscha’s prominence in Jenkins’ writing is appropriate. And yet, their work deserves basic comparisons to the work of Swiss-born Robert Frank. Frank’s social landscape project entitled The Americans first published in the United States in 1959, one year after its release in France, introduced a new form of straight photography in the snapshot relying upon the convenience of the lithe 35mm. Frank introduced a new generation of photographers to a haphazard picture taking that cared more about documenting the present and less about the technical aspects of the medium. This careless methodology or inattention to traditional composition and focus was certainly picked up upon by later generations.



However, Frank’s largest contributions to the New Topographics stem from his documentary style which introduces a sense of irony and neutrality while photographing common life. Here Frank struck a balance between cool objectivity in observance of the mundane. Frank photographed his way across America between 1956-1957 sticking close to larger cities.[2] It is no coincidence that his traveling partner during those days was Jack Kerouac,[3] who published his rambling journey On the Road the same year as Frank’s The Americans was released Stateside. Both express a similar vision of restlessness and alienation[4] in what has been suggested as the kairos moment, pregnant with the enduring American myth.[5] Derrick Price suggests that this project “fractured” the old documentary project of recording the weighty event by Frank’s turn toward the prosaic.[6] By photographing the common place, Frank is shifting the defining balance of identity from the grand moments in history to mundane reality of life. By concentrating on automobiles, roadsides, and the commercial signs certainly influenced photographers to make similar pilgrimages across the land attempting to photograph the always shifting American identity. This investiture of the common life and subject through a reliance upon amateurish techniques and objectivity deeply influences both Ruscha and the New Topographics.



[1] I was unable to relocate the source of this quote.
[2] Robert Frank, “Statement” in Photography In Print: Writings From 1816 to the Present, Ed. Vicki Goldberg, (New York, Simon and Schuster, 1981), 400.
[3] Kerouac also wrote the introduction to The American’s.
[4] H.W. Janson, History of Art, Vol. 2, 5th Edition, (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1995), 880-881.
[5] Derrick Price, Surveyors and Surveyed: Photography Out and About in Photography: A Critical Introduction, 3rd Edition, Ed. by Liz Wells (New York: Routledge, 2004), 100.
[6] Price, 100.

Catholicity and the New Topographics IV

(Robert Adams)

Continuing on with my previous discussions of the New Topographics connection to the F64 group of Ansel Adams and others...

It is not as though the New Topographics rejected the F/64’s objectivity or realism, rather brought it through its logical progression under the weights of mass media, consumption and conceptual art. By utilizing similar methods, the New Topographics turn the intention of the F/64’s utopian vision into ironic statements about anthropology and their interaction with the environment. Thus in comparison to the work of Adams, their work follows postmodern turn of deconstruction and demythologizing.

A facile illustration elucidates this difference by comparing a few iconic works between Ansel Adams and the New Topographer Robert Adams (both sets of images I have chosen to compare are unfortunately hard to find). At a casual glance the compositional and subject similarities emerge between the formers From Glacier Point, Yosemite Valley in 1927 and the latter Adams work called Near Willard, Utah from 1978. But their similarities fade quickly upon the realization of the once alive, now “replanted” pole with its brass identification tag in the upper left hand corner ironizes the human fingerprint upon and within what appears at first a pristine landscape. A similar comparison may be made between Ansel’s Sierra Junipers, Upper Merced Basin, Yosemite Valley from the same era and that of Robert’s Garden of the Gods, El Paso County, Colorado. Once again there is a similarity in composition and subject but with the latter Adams inclusion of a chain link fence hidden at the shadowy foot of the mountain. Ansel’s image is open and inviting, whereas Robert Adams’ halts and contains the viewers entrance by the fence.

Catholicity and the New Topographics III

(Grain Elevators, 1977 - Frank Gohlke)

I want to set up a little art historical context for the New Topographics since it is vital to their understanding and how I will ultimately address them.


It is widely commented that the New Topographics were reacting against Ansel Adams’ F/64 group which drew its name from the aperture of the large format cameras used by Adams, Imogen Cunningham, Edward Weston and others of the group to capture sharpness in both the fore and background. Beaumont Newhall, the photography historian, notes that the F/64 group emerged as a later movement within straight photography as a reaction against the sentimentality of pictorialism.[1] The early straight photographers picked up as their slogan “form follows function” so that their photographs would actually look like photography. This was done in response, as noted above, to pictorialism which “forced photography to emulate the surface textures of pictures made by other media.”[2] What emerges is a new sort of objectivity and realism through a “hands-off” approach. Edward Weston wrote, “the camera should be used for a recording of life, for rendering the very substance and quintessence of the thing itself…the approach to photography is through realism.”[3]

Kelly Dennis suggests that the work of Weston and Adams’ images of unspoiled wilderness have often served utopian ends for Western myths and ideology.[4] This idea of the American Eden is prevalent in responses the F/64’s work. Chris Burnett’s recent paper at the College Art Association draws upon the work of Louis Marin and the contradictions of utopia in human imagination in Utopics: Spatial Play[5] (first published in 1973, just two years before the New Topographics exhibit). Burnett’s term, “degraded utopia” emphasizes the contradictions of “everyday scenes coexist[ing] with simulated landscapes…[to] reveal their mutual utopian destiny as both a ‘good’ and ‘no’ place.”[6]



[1] Beaumont Newhall, The History of Photography (New York, Bullfinch Press, 1982), 192.
[2] Newhall, 167.
[3] Quoted by Newhall, p187-88.
[4] Kelly Dennis, Landscape and the West: Irony and Critique in New Topographic Photography. Paper presented at Forum UNESCO University and Heritage 10th International Seminar, “Cultural Lanscapes in 21st Century” 2005.
[5] Louis Marin, Utopics: Spatial Play (Palgrave Macmillan, 1984).
[6] Chris Burnett, New Topographics Now: Simulated Landscapes and Degraded Utopia, Presented at 2008 College Art Association National Conference.

Catholicity and the New Topographics II

(Water Towers, 1980 - Bernd and Hilla Becher)
















Sheldrake’s first chapter wrestles with complexity and diversity of place which makes it very difficult to pin down in theory and perhaps in practice as well.

Essentially, place “refers not simply to geographical location but to a dialectical relationship between environment and human narrative. Place is space that has the capacity to be remembered and to evoke what is most precious.”[1] Sheldrake is already weeding through common misconceptions of place as simple location as is used in common language today. Secondly, Sheldrake accurately points out the dialectic between the environment and humanity and its reciprocity. Humanity shapes and cultivates its environment which simultaneously impacts its local residents. Sheldrake also leans heavily upon narrative structured remembering and history accounts through Paul Ricouer. A third component of Sheldrake’s theology of place is rooted, to use a metaphor of place, in the evoking of what is precious. What is precious and how does this work? Memory and imagination, formed in the liturgy by the Eucharist will likely play a prominent role in answering these questions.

As I considered the “dialectical” component of Sheldrake’s work, I began to think about Genesis and the creation stories. God offers Adam dominion over creation and not domination. But in our technological age, have we lost the understanding of the “give and take” relationship we have with the environment? Has the earth become another means toward personal and global fulfillment? Another entity that those in power enact said power upon? Do we only recognize the reciprocity in the midst of tragedies such as the tsunami, hurricanes, tornados, and draughts?

So as I am reading Sheldrake’s work again I am continuing to direct my thoughts toward the New Topographics. In the introduction to my paper I’ve written,

“In 1975, William Jenkins, the Assistant Curator of 20th Century Photography at the George Eastman House gallery convened a landmark exhibit titled, “New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape.” The ten invited photographers,[2] each with a distinctive approach, shared a common aesthetic through which they worked. By shifting their lenses from the pristine and Edenic West found in the work of Ansel Adams and Edward Weston, they focused a documentary-like objective gaze upon the emerging banality of place under the shifting weight of industry and consumptive patterns. In turn, they ushered in a profound alteration in landscape photography. Despite the absence of humanity from the images, their work speaks prominently of anthropology and the human imprint upon the landscape.”

The subtitle caught my attention today after reading Sheldrake…”Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape.” If you have not seen any of their work, a common feature is the lack of actual humanity. I cannot recall any images of humanity even being in the show. But the human foot/fingerprint is readily present. Here, most prominently is one half of the dialectic; human imprints upon the world. Only, in a few of Robert Adams photographs, are we subtly aware of nature’s push back into human endeavors.

[1] Philip Sheldrake, Spaces for the Sacred, p.1.
[2] Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Bernd & Hilla Becher, Joe Deal, Frank Gohlke, Nicholas Nixon, John Schott, Stephen Shore, Henry Wessel, Jr.

Catholicity and the New Topographics

(Holden St. North Adams, Massachusetts, 1974 by Stephen Shore)

Well now that Christmas day has passed and all the preparations that went into it, I feel as if I can finally turn my attention to research and writing the paper for CTS at the end of May. The paper is titled, Re-Viewing Place: Catholicity and the New Topographics which is an attempt to reconcile my studies in art, theology and place into a cohesive proposal. I am thankful that I have made good headway into researching the New Topographics this last semester in my 20th & 21st C. Art History Class. One of the struggles in this project is the relatively little engagement this group has received until a more recent resurgence in interest in the group.

My paper will examine Philip Sheldrake's Spaces for the Sacred as a potential hermeneutical lens, not only for place, but the landscapes of the New Topographics. Sheldrake's lens is one of catholicity formed by the Eucharist. My hope is to explore the implications of his proposal for mission, and to some extent ethics and ecology.

My hope is to fill postings here with my progress and musings over the next few months as I interact with these ideas. I am beginning with a re-reading of Sheldrake's text which I read in 2006 as part of a larger inquiry into sacred space/place.

Stephen Shore Video