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Draft: Reframing the New Topographics: Mark Rawlinson

Disconsolate and Inconsolable: Neutrality and “New Topographics”

Introduction

More than thirty years have passed since George Eastman House curator William Jenkins

gathered together a group of mostly American photographers in the exhibition, New

Topographics: Photographs of a Man-altered Landscape. In the spirit of art historian

Benjamin Buchloh’s critique of Conceptual Art, this passage of time ‘both allows and obliges

us to contemplate the history of [New Topographics] in a broader perspective than that of the

convictions held during its emergence and operation.’1 The obvious place to begin is with

Jenkins’ introductory essay; it is an exegesis that, much like the exhibition’s photographs, is

without frills and to the point. According to Jenkins, New Topographics photographers are

working in a documentary mode that knowingly draws upon nineteenth century survey

photography, notably the model of Timothy O’Sullivan, and a prevalent ‘picture-making

attitude’ whose origin the curator establishes in the 1960s photoconceptual work of Ed

Ruscha.2 As convincing as Jenkins’ articulate framing of New Topographics once appeared,

the intervening years have been less than kind to the central tenets of his argument. The

single-minded insistence on stylistic anonymity and a concomitant lack of artistic judgement

or opinion evident in the work of the new topographic photographers - an argument ably

supported with quotes from two key photographers in the exhibition: Lewis Baltz and Joe

Deal - have been subject to theoretical critique since the 1980s.3

What follows is not a root and branch critique of New Topographics but a

reconsideration of Jenkins’ emphasis on neutrality and stylistic anonymity in relation to the

work of one photographer, Robert Adams, and one photograph, Colorado Springs, Colorado
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(1968) (fig. 7.1). It is a simple picture of a simple tract house made considerably less simple

when we begin to contemplate it beyond the convictions that accompanied its inception and

early reception. The aim of this essay is, therefore, to address a series of issues arising from

the conceptual grounding of New Topographics on an identifiable and significant effort on

the part of the individual photographer ‘to prevent the slightest trace of judgment or opinion

from entering their work.’4 According to Jenkins, this aesthetic of neutrality and stylistic

anonymity might best be explained as the convergence of nineteenth century geographical

survey photography - exemplified by Timothy O’Sullivan - and the 1960s photo-conceptual

work of Ed Ruscha. But do the arguments for New Topographics’ neutral aesthetic and

photographic history stand up to scrutiny? As Deborah Bright reminds us, the historical

lineage drawn between New Topographics and nineteenth century survey photography is an

institutional construct rather than genealogical fact.5 Moreover, many of Ruscha’s

contemporaries were engaged with conceptual approaches to the ubiquitous tract house and

so-called mundane architecture proliferating in the American landscape.6

Of course, the emphasis on housing and the home in photo-conceptualism and New

Topographics refers, perhaps for differing reasons, to a much older, modernist concern:

dwelling; or, more accurately, the impossibility of dwelling in the proper sense in the

twentieth century. The subject of Adams’ photograph - the tract house - reminds us of one

reason why: a new form of vernacular architecture whose existence owes more to the needs

of real-estate developers and advertising executives (what political philosopher Theodor

Adorno called the ‘totally administered world’) than to the needs of the houses’ future

inhabitants. The appearance of many tract houses borrowed visual cues from say the

California modern homes of Richard Neutra and Gregory Ain but only as stylistic features; I

am thinking here especially of the picture window, which in high architecture was placed to

frame a particular (and beautiful) view. No such aesthetic consideration was made when
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situating the picture window of the tract house. The picture window plays a crucial role in

this essay because it is this feature, which exemplifies Adams’ pursuit of ‘Form’ even as it

showcases an active irritant, that Theodor Adorno calls ‘the retention of strangeness’,

disrupts any hope of a desired formal harmony in the image. The disruptive element is the

silhouetted figure: who is the person in the window? Is her facelessness significant? And,

what about Adams’ caption for the photograph: ‘The house was identical with others in the

development. I felt the sadness of figure but I also loved the light’? New Topographics, as

conceptualzed in Jenkins’ essay, with its foregrounding of formal harmony, stylistic

anonymity and authorial neutrality appears resistant to such questions.

In what follows, I argue that a closer look at Colorado Springs, Colorado reveals

much about both its subject-matter and the formal concerns that defined New Topographics.

The image simultaneously exemplifies what home had come to mean in 1970s America and

the limits of the (often self-imposed) restrictions that characterize New Topographics

photographic practice. As such, Colorado Springs, Colorado is a mirror that reflects as well

as frames a reflection. It is these metaphors of framing and mirroring that call into question

Jenkins’ articulation of the new topographics.

The New Style

Before taking up Adams’ Colorado Springs image, it makes sense to begin with Jenkins’

original conception of “new topographics.” New Topographics as an all-encompassing ‘ism’

cannot justly communicate real and critical differences in the work of so-named

photographers (Adams, Baltz, Deal, etc.), and yet it remains a sensible descriptor for the

work of Adams, Baltz, Deal, et al. both in its identification of a shift in the representation of
 4

landscape and as a consideration of the photographer’s impulse to authorial anonymity; an

anonymity that ‘guarantees’ a formal analysis of a scene without judgment. Jenkins

adamantly connects this feature to the photographers’ work throughout his Introduction. He

quotes Lewis Baltz’s statement that, ‘The ideal photographic document would appear to be

without author or art’, even though Baltz concedes photographs are ‘abstractions and that

their information is selective and incomplete’.7 He also approvingly mentions Joe Deal’s self-

commentary on his working methodology where he reveals his ‘desire for less personal

intrusion and greater uniformity.’8 In both cases, the similarity in the photographers’

descriptions of how they work and the type of work they wish to produce enables Jenkins’ to

construct his argument. Yet ironically, this similarity in approach is also what helps visually

distinguish the work of one photographer from another.

Jenkins roots this New Topographics foundation in two earlier sources. On the one

side lies the New Topographics artists’ acknowledged debt to the nineteenth century survey

photography, especially the work of Timothy O’Sullivan and his unprecedented photographs

of the American West. On the other is the conceptual practice of Ed Ruscha, exemplified by

his photo-books Twentysix Gasoline Stations, Various Small Fires and Milk, and Nine

Swimming Pools and a Broken Glass. What connects these two seemingly distinct

approaches is ‘stylistic anonymity’. Describing Ruscha’s pictures (although the same might

be said of O’Sullivan’s), Jenkins observes that the images are seemingly ‘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’.9 He

admits to belabouring the point about Ruscha’s deadpan photographic-gaze in order to

emphasise a correlation and distance between New Topographics and photoconceptualism.

Where the latter engaged in a critique of the aesthetic claims of fine photography, the former

does not. For now though, let us stick with idea of a neutral ‘picture-making attitude’ because
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here Jenkins’ observations ring true with Adams work.

In his 1974 ‘Foreword’ to Robert Adams’, The New West: Landscapes Along the

Colorado Front Range, John Szarkowski presages Jenkins point when he warns that some

viewers might find Adams’ photographs of the American landscape ‘dull’. The reason being

that the photographs eschew ‘hyperbole [and] theatrical gestures […].’10 For one thing,

Adams’ landscape photographs simply do not replay or do not replay simply the obvious

tropes of more traditional American landscape photography. There are no magisterial views

of immense swathes of desert or mountains ranges fore-grounded by crystal clear lakes.

Adams’ landscapes might include those more traditional pictorial elements but they are

largely secondary to tract and mobile homes, gas stations, and other forms human detritus.

Szarkowski’s worry here is that if Adams’ photographs have a message, it is not altogether

clear what it might be. Are we to find these photographs beautiful? Impressive? Emotive?

As art historian Kelly Dennis puts it somewhat more plainly

the culture of the United States is one that does not much care for irony or ethical

ambiguity. Photography, despite more than a century’s evidence of easy

manipulation, nonetheless remains a medium from which we expect transparency. We

are, perhaps, never more frustrated than when the photograph fails to tell us what it

means or is about something other than what it is a picture of.11

Several connected points relating to the history of photography are worth mentioning at this

juncture, though each will be considered in detail later: the first, an eloquent observation on

photography and modernism expressed by Victor Burgin in Thinking Photography, helps

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frame the evident formalism of both Adams’ and Szarkowski’s (self-) criticism. For Burgin

[p]hotograpy…was unable to follow painting into modernist abstraction without the

appearance of straining after effect: the unprecedented capacity of photography for

resemblance seemed most appropriately to determine its specific work and distinguish

it from painting.12

Burgin highlights here early modern photography’s more subtle path toward a form of

abstraction haunted by the spectre of resemblance but one that nonetheless secured for

photography its distinction from painting. In the process of obtaining a degree of autonomy

from painting, photography itself acquired an altogether more ambiguous stature. One can

argue that the distinctiveness of New Topographics photography was, perversely, its

indistinctiveness; a straightforward way of dealing with photographs without clear or obvious

meaning to be derived from content is to attend to form. But when we encounter Robert

Adams (or new topographics) photograph, what are we looking at/engaging with? Is it

formalist experiment, a form of social commentary, or straight documentary? Burgin suggests

that this failure on the part of the photograph, or more accurately, the way in which

photographic meaning is interpreted, is simply because photography has never ‘succeeded in

breaking clear of the gravitational field of nineteenth century thinking: thinking dominated by

the metaphor of depth, in which the surface of the photograph is viewed as the projection of

something which lies behind or beyond the surface’.13 Enter Ruscha and the example of

photoconceptualism as an active deconstruction of the idea of something existing behind or

beyond '; wherein the ‘behind’ and the ‘beyond’ are not hidden essences but something far

more prosaic and vernacular.

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Despite the high-profile that Jenkins gives to Ruscha, he does realize a limit to New

Topographics’ adoption of photoconceptual principles, a point made clear by art historian

Pamela Lee and Buchloh in their recent scholarship on conceptual art. Buchloh’s description

of conceptual art relies heavily on the idea of prohibition: where modernist critique

prohibited ‘figurative representation’ which in turn became a ‘dogmatic law for pictorial

production in the first decade of the twentieth century, so Conceptual Art now instated the

prohibition of any and all visuality as the inescapable aesthetic rule for the end of the

twentieth century.’ Likewise, the Dadaist readymade which

had negated not only figurative representation, authenticity, and authorship while

introducing repetition and the series (i.e., the law of industrial production) to replace

the studio aesthetic of the handcrafted original, Conceptual Art came to displace even

that image of the mass-produced object and its aestheticized forms in Pop Art,

replacing an aesthetic of industrial production and consumption with an aesthetic of

administrative and legal organization and institutional validation.14

The employment of photography and the photograph was bound up in this prohibitive,

administrative aesthetic. Artists like Gordon Matta-Clark, Robert Smithson and Dan Graham,

for example, questioned the privileged roles of photographer and viewer alike in their work.

Crucially, though, and this point is significant, Buchloh says:

Conceptual practices…reflected upon the construction and the role (or death) of the

author just as much as they redefined the conditions of receivership and the role of the

spectator. Thus they performed the postwar period’s most rigorous investigation of the

conventions of pictorial and sculptural representation and a critique of the traditional

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paradigms of visuality.15

The critique of what Buchloh calls ‘concerned’ photography was, therefore, an important

aspect in Conceptual Art’s displacement of artistic or visual authority.

Pamela Lee similarly has addressed Conceptual Art’s appropriation of photography –

photoconceptualism - offering the following definition:

A dogged insistence on the subject of architecture, typically classed as industrial or

vernacular. We see the proliferation of suburban tract homes; an endless horizon of

disused factories and warehouses; the unblinking sprawl of motels, gas stations, and

parking lots. […] we confront the architecture of late-capitalism, a field of dumb

structures with little or nothing to recommend them aesthetically.16

Both Lee’s and Buchloh’s criticisms of (photo)conceptual art offer a productive framework

for thinking through this historical relationship beyond shared surface visual similarities.

Robert Adams clearly is interested in the ‘dumb structures’ of late-capitalism. We can see

something of the administrative aesthetic, too - the highly-rationalised survey approach to the

photographic subject, for example: But what about the more subversive aspects of

photoconceptualism?

As Buchloh notes with some suspicion, conceptual artists subjected their working

practices to deliberate and strict definitions - ‘the artist as a cataloguing clerk,’ for example -

whilst simultaneously asserting the ‘subversive and radical implications of Conceptual Art.’17

He suggests that conceptual art ‘mimed the operating logic of late capitalism and its positivist
 9

instrumentality’ in order ‘to analyze and expose the social institutions from which the laws of

positivist instrumentality and the logic of administration emanate in the first place.’ 18 From

inception, he says ‘Conceptual Art was distinguished by its acute sense of discursive and

institutional limitations, its self-imposed restrictions, its lack of totalizing vision, its critical

devotion to the factual conditions of artistic production and reception without aspiring to

overcome the mere facticity of these conditions.’19 One can read nineteenth century survey

photography as similarly ideological, both in terms of its production (why it was

commissioned, who by, for what purposes, etc.) and through the way in which photographers

of the period, like Timothy O’Sullivan, have been ‘repackaged as indisputable sires of an

artistic bloodline of photographers who are to be selected and legitimated by a powerful

cultural institution, the Museum of Modern Art.’20

Returning to Lee and the ‘dumb-structures’ of late-capitalism, photoconceptualism’s

interest in aesthetically mundane architecture is important for two reasons. The first of which

refers to photography’s long relationship with architecture, starting with Nicéphore Niécpe’s

heliograph image of a building in a French courtyard (1827). She argues: ‘The representation

of that building as both materially immanent and transient is not unlike the spatio-temporal

behaviour of photographs themselves, which at once attempt to ground or situate a place in

perpetuity and necessarily register a sense of historical loss in the process of doing so.’21

What differentiates photoconceptualism from ‘concerned’ or ‘fine photography’ (even

modernist photography) post-Niécpe is its development of a critical consciousness with

regards to the historical - history as representation, representation as cultural - and the

eschewal of aesthetic conventions associated with fine art photography.22 Lee connects

photoconceptualism to the shift in ‘conceptions of temporality’ in the 1960s brought about by

media technologies in particular, which results in cultural ‘acceleration and repetition’. The
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1960s, she argues, mark the ‘temporalization of the environment’ (or place) and hence the

‘accelerated development of urban sprawl, tract housing, strip malls and other ready-made

architecture.’23 Her aim is to show the ‘increasingly tenuous character of place in the postwar

moment’, a critical point grasped in the photoconceptual work of Smithson, Graham and

Matta-Clark, but something very much in line with Adams’ work, too. The question remains,

though, is Adams (or New Topographics) aware of or engaged with the ‘conceptual belief in

the idea of the material embeddedness of a work’s relationship to place’?24 A point I shall

take up below.

The New Vernacular

Adams’ photograph is stark and unforgiving. A full-frontal composition, cropped as crisply

and severely as the right-angles of the architectural structure itself, which in turn is cut

roughly into horizontal thirds: a central thick, black band of shadow sandwiched between the

hot white light of the sun, punctured only by a square aperture of light and a silhouetted

figure within the metal frame of the picture-window. The strong compositional structure of

this photograph emphasises form, presenting a harmonious whole. The shadow across the

mid-section of the house draws attention to another series of square and rectangular forms

and to the woman. I will argue that this figure, along with the photographic caption - ‘The

house was identical with others in the development. I felt the sadness of the figure but I also

loved the light’ - offers an immanent challenge to the defining characteristics of new

topographics.

Of all the features tract developments, from their country club names to the speed

with which the houses themselves were constructed, the picture window was the most
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popular. However, Adams’ caption disrupts the avowed aim of the New Topographics

photographers to produce non-judgmental photographic images. The photographic caption, as

Walter Benjamin notes, has a ‘different character than the title of a painting’; its presence

should alert us to query its appearance.25 In this case, the caption at once directs us toward the

faceless figure silhouetted in the picture window while simultaneously erasing the subject -

projecting an aesthetic rather than empathetic response (we are to admire the way in which

light articulates form).

Post-World War II America witnessed the emergence of suburbia with the first large

scale developments of tract housing. This explosion of out-of-town developments would not

have been successful without the introduction of Federal Housing Administration policies

that encouraged urban dispersal and the eleven million mortgages for these new homes

offered by Veterans Society Administration. With repayments often cheaper than paying rent,

most of these mortgages were aimed at the ‘single-family suburban construction’.26 With

hindsight, the emphasis on the ‘new’ meant that the FHA and VA programs actively

‘discouraged the renovation existing housing stock’; moreover, the contemporaneous 41,000-

mile interstate highway program, with federal and local subsidies for road improvement,

made commuting an affordable option for the average American.. 27 As the architect Andres

Duany has pointed out, to young American families in the early 1950s, the out-of-town

housing developments such as Levittown were almost impossible to resist. Of course, the

result was what is often called a ‘migration’ or exodus from the historical city neighborhoods

to the edges of the city and then beyond (closely followed by the stores once located in the

downtown areas of the city to out of town shopping malls).

The migration out of the cities was also encouraged of course by the advertising

industry and media. Other than the obvious economic reasons, two brief examples help
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contextualise why so many young Americans participated in the migration to the suburbs. In

Constantin Alajalov’s Moonlit Future cover for the August 1959 issue of The Saturday

Evening Post, a young couple sitting under a tree considering their future together, looks into

the night sky where constellations of stars form to reveal a ranch-style tract home complete

with garage, picture window, as well as countless labor-saving devices for the kitchen and the

home. Alajalov’s moonlit future image became less a dream and more a realizable possibility

once the reader opened the The Saturday Evening Post and worked their way through pages

of advertisements for exactly the products lit up in stars and the lifestyle they embodied.

Perhaps more bizarrely, the couple’s dream-future, a symbolic representation of the

American Dream and aspirations of all Americans, was at the heart of Vice-President Richard

Nixon and Soviet Premier Nikita Kruschev’s ‘Kitchen Debate’ of the same year, where the

two men traded ideological blows in a demonstrator kitchen. Over a display of American

kitchen appliances in the ‘American Exhibition’, which took place in Sokolniki Park,

Moscow, Nixon button-holed the Soviet Premier, saying, ‘I want to show you this kitchen. It

is like those of our houses in California’. Nixon explained how everything on display was

mass-produced to be installed directly into new American homes, making the point that the

modern American kitchen and consumerism more generally exemplified the American way of

life. American freedoms such as mobility and consumer choice ultimately offered, according

to Nixon, ‘Freedom from drudgery for the housewife.’28

As architecture historian Beatriz Colomina argues, suburbia and the suburban home

offered a ‘new species of space’―sites where American middle-class ideals were

reconfigured firmly realigning femininity and the home after a period in which women’s

roles during the war effort had introduced them to freedoms away from the home. 29

Historian Elaine Tyler May refers to this process as ‘domestic containment,’ relating its
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emergence to the perceived threat to the American way of life by communism (hence

Nixon’s visit to the ‘American Exhibition’). The Cold War and the spectre of communism

encouraged the need for security; as such, May has argued, middle-class Americans

especially, ‘wanted secure jobs, secure homes, and secure marriages in a secure country.’30

To a large extent, this argument also accounts for the speedy transition of suburbia from

being viewed as a radical departure with the past to the ‘normal habitat of Americans.’31

But what distinguishes this new ‘habitat’? In other words, what architectural features

define the suburban tract house and, more importantly, what have been the effects of these

features on the middle-class America. Walter Benjamin has argued that the ‘twentieth-

century, with its porosity and transparency, its tendency toward the well lit and airy, has put

an end to dwelling in the old sense.’32 Benjamin’s description has its roots in the modernist

ethos of purity (Mies Van Der Rohe’s famous dictum, ‘Less is more’) and light, but it reflects

the ethos of the tract house with its large picture window. The most significant architects who

took up this line of thinking in an American context are Richard Neutra and Gregory Ain,

who between them designed what we recognize as the quintessential ‘California modern

style’ home. Unfortunately, the originality and aesthetic purity of the original California

modern style home had little true connection to mass-produced tract housing developments

that followed. That subsequent architecture was, as historian Thomas Hine says, ‘more about

style than replicating precisely the architectural innovations of Neutra or Ain.’ For example,

Neutra designed ‘overhanging roofs to shade large windows on the sunny side of the house’,

a functional design feature that ‘developers overlooked’; any overhang on the tract house

being nothing more than ‘a bit of California styling.’33 More importantly, Hine notes that,

‘while in the custom-designed houses the largest windows would frame the best view, in a

developer’s house a similar window would look on whatever happened to be outside.’34

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We have no clue from Adams’ photograph what view this picture window frames,

though we can assume by his caption [‘The house was identical with others in the

development. I felt the sadness of the figure but I also loved the light’], that the view consists

of a row of identical houses opposite, each house mirroring its neighbors and those across the

street.35 (In this case, the view from the house is interrupted by a man on the front lawn with

a large camera). Adams’ picture therefore situates us on the same patch of lawn, staring in at

the silhouetted, faceless figure caught in the camera viewfinder, a view that again is mirrored

by the framing of the woman between the windows at the front and the rear of the house. At

the moment the shutter was released, the woman framed by picture window and framed

through the viewfinder and finally framed by edges of the photograph itself, seems unaware

of the photographer’s presence. Adams’ senses the ‘sadness’ of the figure but is equally

moved by the light in the frame.

Before addressing this sadness, let us talk about light. Light is important to Adams,

who says it ‘works an alchemy’; that is, it bestows upon the most base object a transcendent

or resplendent quality not usually evident.36 Light is also artistic material in that it requires

consideration on the part of the artist/photographer.37 It reveals form.38 In his opening

comments to his photographic survey, Denver: A Photographic Survey of the Metropolitan

Area, Adams - with reference to Edward Weston - that what a photographer wants is ‘form,

an unarguably right relationship of shapes, a visual stability in which all components are

equally important. The photographer hopes, in brief, to discover a tension so exact that it is at

peace.’39 He concludes his rumination with the assertion that the ‘form the photographer

records, though discovered in a split second of literal fact, is different because it implies an

order beyond itself….’40 How does this description fit his Colorado Springs photograph?
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What, exactly, is the order beyond itself that the photograph records? One might also ask,

after Deborah Bright, how can it be that despite Jenkins’ admission that New Topographics

photographs (such as the one under scrutiny here) contain ‘substantial amounts of visual

information’41, they remain, above all else, ‘aesthetic arrangements resisting interpretation.’42

In fact, Bright argues, somewhat forcefully, ‘there is no “form” outside of interpretation.

Formal orders are human structures and perceptions, not given essences.'43 Human beings

have the ability to find resemblances, connections and patterns between things when in

reality no such resemblances, connections and patterns exist.

The duel between the aesthetic and empathetic sensibilities, form and content, seems

unreasonably focused upon the aesthetic at the expense of the empathetic; if the love of light

and form extends back to the work of Weston (and the likes of Charles Sheeler), then one can

see a connection between the New Topographics, and Adams’ Colorado Springs photograph,

and the Neue Sachlichkeit or New Objectivity photography of the 1920s/30s. I mention this

mainly because Walter Benjamin’s criticisms of Neue Sachlichkeit have resonance. For

Benjamin the formalism of Neue Sachlichkeit, especially in the photography of Albert

Renger-Patzsch, over-aestheticises its subject, succeeding ‘in making even abject poverty, by

recording it in a fashionably perfected manner, into an object of enjoyment.’44 I am not

suggesting Benjamin’s critique of Neue Sachlichkeit can be applied simplistically to the

aesthetic approaches of New Topographics photography or Adams specifically. Rather, my

concern is that when we consider only the stylized aspects of Adams’ photograph, in that we

congratulate him on capturing the light that frames the sad figure, we then forget to ask: what

is this woman so sad about? If we divert our attention away from the photograph’s beguiling

combinations of light and shade, combinations of structural geometry and the compositional

use of the golden mean, or at least consider them not as an end in themselves, we avoid over-
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aestheticising the squarely framed, and back-lit woman, and remember to ask other questions.

When one reads that Adams’ loved the light, is he describing a reaction to the way

light saturates the top and bottom of the image, leaving a thick band of shadow across the

house that blackens the glass in the door, bestowing upon it solidity that in reality does not

exist? Is it the way in which the roofline recedes almost imperceptibly into the cloudless sky

or the way the garden path leading to the front door gleams white and smooth before being

sharply cut into darkness before the porch steps? Or, perhaps it is how the tiny aperture of

light afforded by a small window in the rear of the house captures perfectly, in profile, the

figure of a woman. The light that activates all of the formal innovation in this photograph

also activates the breakdown in the ‘tight relationship of shapes’ and ‘the visual stability’ of

the image: the human figure becomes an incongruous element in the frame. This incongruity

is accentuated by the facelessness of the figure.

The facelessness of the figure mirrors the homogenized nature marking the front yard

of the tract house; even here every house is indistinguishable from the next. The figure

personifies what Adorno has called America’s ‘disconsolate and inconsoloable’ landscape.45

The facelessness of the subject deserves our attention because, as the sociologist Georg

Simmel has argued, the face 'offers itself as the first object of the gaze between one person

and another'. The face is, therefore, ‘the symbol of everything that an individual has brought

with him or her as the prerequisite of their life.’46 One has only to think of portraiture and its

place in art to recognise the crucial role of the face in culture; as Simmel notes, the face

'strikes us as the symbol, not only of the spirit, but also of an unmistakable personality.’47

The lack of personality and spirit in the faceless figure speaks to concerns about the suburbs

themselves in the early 1970s. The picture window (as a transparent threshold between
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interior and exterior, public and private, and stylistic architectural affectation) and dwelling

are equally problematic.

A Picture Window

The architectural historian Beatriz Colomina has suggested,

The picture window was an integral element of the post-war American house. It turns

the building into a showcase of domesticity. It is not, as is commonly assumed, that

house exposes its interiority. There is no interior. What the window reveals is not a

private space but a public representation of conventional domesticity […]48

Her observation regarding the collapse of public/private space instigated by the picture

window alerts us to the plight of the woman in Adams’ photograph. Adorno sums up the

woman’s surroundings well in his reflections on post-war housing: ‘The functional modern

habitations designed from a tabla rasa, are living-cases manufactured by experts for

philistines, or factory sites that have strayed into the consumption sphere, devoid of all

relation to the occupant: in them even the nostalgia for independent existence is sent

packing.’ It is not a surprise, then, when Adorno laments: ‘The house is past’.49 Adorno is

arguing that one can no longer feel at home in one’s own home: ‘Dwelling, in the proper

sense, is now impossible.50 Here caught on film, trapped a pre-fabricated mausoleum we find

the American homemaker: a figure who cannot bear to look out of the picture window. The

reason, Adams’ suggests, is that ‘We are tired, I think, of staring at our corruption.’51

Adams readily admits that ‘Anybody who simplifies the confusion of life into a

composition is making personal judgments from the start.’52 He recognizes that the suburbs
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have ‘evolved’, and while this development has been ‘anarchic,’ the resulting buildings are

‘monotonous,’ and the effect has been to freeze the lives of those living in the desert. The

dominant experience of the residents of Colorado Springs, Jefferson County, Longmont and

Arvada is, he says, shaped by ‘anonymity and loneliness’.53 Adams was thinking all these

things while he was shooting Colorado Springs, Colorado. Does this sound like a person not

making personal judgements as they compose a picture in the camera viewfinder? Was it

really the light that attracted a moth-like Adams, or was it something of the frozen life of an

anonymous woman, standing alone in a room in an identi-kit tract house. The point is simply

this: when thinking about an image like Colorado Springs, Colorado, does the critical

framing of new topographics curtail rather than amplifly possible readings of the image?

Colorado Springs, Colorado (1968) and Adams’ other photographs of tract and mobile

housing, as well as, for example, Dan Graham’s Homes for America (1966), precede wider

cultural and social concerns in the early 1970s, including that Urban Historians William

Sharpe and Leonard Wallock describe as ‘the urbanization of the suburbs.’ During the early

1970s, Sharpe and Wallock suggest, journalists and scholars ‘coined a new set of terms to

redefine the changing American suburb [[in a] flurry of articles and books [which] introduced

neologisms such as’ "outer city," "satellite sprawl," "new city," "suburban 'city,"' "urban

fringe," and "neocity".’54 The optimistic almost utopian vision of suburbia and suburban life

that dominated the 1950s had been replaced by a darker, perhaps more realistic, consideration

of tract developments. California Environmentalist William Bronson, in How to Kill a

Golden State (1968), was highly critical of the lines of ‘ticky tacky’ housing blanketing the

American landscape. ‘[O]f all the elements of our environment’, he argued, ‘none is as

important as that thing called “home”.’55 And, yet, he added, many houses built since the

1950s are best described as ‘schlock’. He then pinpointed social mobility as the cause of such

terrible housing conditions:

 19

We are the most mobile society in the “civilised” world, so mobile indeed that we buy

and sell our homes with no more emotion than we attach to buying and selling cars.

And this very mobility further detaches us from the affection for community and

tradition that must underlie any civilization.56

Adams’ uses a similar ‘vernacular’ when describing the effects of mobility - although he uses

the more grandiose ‘liberty’.

Liberty meant leaving people, whatever their needs, behind. We became a nation of

boomers, everlastingly after a new start out in the open, by ourselves. This morally

indefensible equation of space, understood as distance from others, and freedom,

understood as license to pursue one’s interests without regard for those of others (no

one else being in view), has ended of course in the reduction of everyone’s freedom. 57

The figure in the window attests not just the vague accusation that everyone’s freedom has

been reduced; what Adams’ captures is not the end of everyone’s freedom but the loss of

freedom of the housewife, in particular, the woman to whom Nixon not ten years before had

promised a life free from drudgery. If the American obsession with mobility is partly to

blame, then this vernacular house looks less like a home and more like a waiting room with

no exit; literally a room in which you wait and nothing else.

The cultural geographer J.B. Jackson has argued that the Americanization of the
 20

‘vernacular’ tradition emerged from the ‘novelties’ faced by the early settlers. There was ‘the

abundance of wood for construction, the abundance of land, the rapid increase in the young

population, and the scarcity of skilled labor.’58 From these beginnings

came a vernacular style characterized by short-lived or temporary dwellings focused on

the family and the distinct place of work, largely independent of the traditional

community constraints and institutions, dwellings using new construction techniques,

and with a new relationship to the environment.59

But Jackson’s contextual historicising cannot deflect or dissuade him from coming to a

conclusion similar to that of Adams. ‘Compared to traditional, pretechnological dwellings,’

Jackson admits, ‘ours are spiritually and culturally impoverished. Our almost uncontrollable

love of making “environments” – never stronger than now – compels us to create in our

houses as well as our cities environments that are good for nothing but health and recreation,

environments almost entirely without content.’60 Or, houses in which it is impossible to

dwell.

Conclusion

Adams has made a career of exploring the progressive deterioration and ruination of the

American West by unfettered human activity and the precarious role of photographic practice

in taking note of and trying to arrest that fate. His great ally in this project is nineteenth

century survey photography, especially the work of Timothy O’Sullivan. What nineteenth

century landscape photography affords us today, according to Adams is the equivalent of the

control subject in a scientific experiment: it shows us what the West looked like before

expansionism and commerce infiltrated and exploited the space ‘out there’. As such, he
 21

writes: ‘To love the old views is not entirely hopeless nostalgia, but rather an understandable

and fitting passion for what can in some measure be ours again.’ 61 But this note of

redemption is weakened somewhat by Adams practice, his photographs and his writing,

which seem to suggest otherwise. But more importantly, whilst the conceptual grounds of

New Topographics might once have appeared valid and necessary, they now lack legitimacy

and the work of Adams et al deserve a more robust and responsive critique. In the end,

Adams’ photograph Colorado Springs, Colorado (1968) is everything that home cannot be –

literally and philosophically – and everything that New Topographics cannot be – pure,

neutral, and non-judgmental.

1
Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, ‘Conceptual Art 1962-1969: From the Aesthetic of Administration

to the Critique of Institutions’, October, Vol. 55. (Winter, 1990), p. 105. I have paraphrased

Buchloh here; the full quotation reads: ‘A twenty-year distance separates us from the historical

moment of Conceptual Art. It is a distance that both allows and obliges us to contemplate the

movement’s history in a broader perspective than that of the convictions held during the decade

of its emergence and operation (roughly from 1965 to its temporary disappearance in 1975).
2
William Jenkins, New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape. Catalogue. Rochester,

NY: International Museum of Photography at the George Eastman House, 1975 p. 5.

3
See Abigail Solomon-Godeau, ‘Who is Speaking Thus?’ in Photography at the Dock: Essays on

Photographic History, Institutions and Practices, Minneapolis: University o Minnesota Press, [1991].

1995, pp. 169-183; and, Martha Rosler, ‘In, Around, and Afterthoughts (on Documentary

Photography)’ in Richard Bolton (ed), The Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories of Photography,

Cambridge, Mass., London: The MIT Press, [1989], 1996, p. 303-342. This is a revised version of

Rosler’s essay originally published in Martha Rosler: 3 Works, Halifax: The Press of Nova Scotia

College of Art and Design, 1981.

 22

4
Jenkins, New Topographics, p. 7
5
See Deborah Bright, ‘Of Mother Nature and Marlboro Men: An Inquiry Into the Cultural

Meanings of Landscape Photography’, 1985

http://www.deborahbright.com/PDF/Bright-Marlboro.pdf. Date Visited 06/01/09.

6
Dan Graham’s work, with his own investment in tract houses (Homes For America, [1966], Picture

Window Piece [1974] and Alterations to a Suburban House, [1978/1992]), offers an alternate and

aesthetic connection As Buchloh notes, Graham’s mid-60s work was influenced by Ruscha’s

picture-books produced earlier that decade. ‘Conceptual Art came to displace even that image of

the mass-produced object and its aestheticized forms in Pop Art, replacing an aesthetic of

industrial production and consumption with an aesthetic of administrative and legal organization

and institutional validation.’ Buchloh, 119

7
Lewis Baltz quoted in Jenkins, New Topographics, p. 6
8
Joe Deal quoted in Jenkins, New Topographics, p. 6-7
9
Jenkins, New Topographics, p. 5
10
Robert Adams, The New West: Landscapes Along the Colorado Front Range [originally published

1974], New York: Aperture Foundation, 2008,

11
Kelly Dennis, ‘Landscape and the West: Irony and Critique in New Topographic

Photography’, p. 4

www.ncl.ac.uk/unescolandscapes/files/DENNISKelly.pdf. Date visited 06/01/09.

12
Victor Burgin (ed.), Thinking Photography, London: Macmillan, 1982, p. 11
13
Burgin, Thinking Photography, p. 11
14
Buchloh, ‘Conceptual Art’, p. 119
15
Buchloh, ‘Conceptual Art’, p. 107
16
Pamela Lee, ‘The Austerlitz Effect: Architecture, Time and Photoconceptualism’ in Douglas

Fogle, The Last Picture Show: Artists Using Photography 1960-1982, Walker Art Center, 2003, p.186
 23

17
Buchloh, ‘Conceptual Art’, p. 140
18
Buchloh, ‘Conceptual Art’, p. 143. I must point out that Buchloh’s argument is more complex

in that, in this instance, he refers to Hans Haacke and Daniel Buren, whose work he says

successfully managed to mime and critique ideological institutions. Not all conceptual art

managed to do so.
19
Buchloh, ‘Conceptual Art’, p. 141
20
Bright, ‘Marlboro Men’ p. 6.
21
Lee, ‘The Austerlitz Effect’, p. 186
22
Lee, ‘The Austerlitz Effect’, p. 187
23
Lee, ‘The Austerlitz Effect’, p. 187
24
Lee, ‘The Austerlitz Effect’, p. 189
25
Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of art in the Age of its Mechanical Reproduction’ in Walter

Benjamin, Illuminations, (Hannah Arendt, ed. Harry Zohn, trans.), Fontana Press, 1992, p. 220
26
Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk and Jeff Speck, Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and

the Decline of the American Dream, New York: North Point Press, 2000, p. 8
27
Duany et al, Suburban Nation, p. 8
28
Karal Ann Marling, As Seen on TV: The Visual Culture of Everyday Life in the 1950s, Cambridge,

Mass. London: Harvard University Press, 1994, p. 243.

29
Beatriz Colomina, ‘Introduction’ in Beatriz Colomina, Annmarie Brennan and Jeannie Kim

(eds), Cold War Hothouses: Inventing Postwar Culture, from Cockpit to Playboy, New York: Princeton

Architectural Press, 2004, p. 12

30
Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era, New York: Basic

Books, 1988, p. 13
31
Thomas Hine Populuxe, London: Bloomsbury Publishing Limited, 1987, p. 37
 24

32
Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, Cambridge, Massachusetss and London, England: The

Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1999, p. 220-1

33
Hine Populuxe, p. 48-49
34
Hine Populuxe, p. 49
35
In, The New West: Landscapes Along the Colorado Front Range (New York: Aperture, 2008), Adams’

includes a photograph with the caption ‘Out a front window, Longmont’ (p. 42-43). Here we get

some sense of what the picture window might frame: a view of single-storey tract housing both

across the street and into the distance, parked cars and telegraph poles: Non-descript,

homogenous and brightly lit by the Colorado sunshine.

36
Robert Adams, Denver: A Photographic Survey of the Metropolitan Area, Colorado: Colorado

Associated University press in cooperation with The State Historical Society of Colorado, 1977,

unpaginated
37
See Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, (trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor), Minneapolis: University

of Minnesota Press, 1997, p. 148.

38
It is worth mentioning briefly but the insistence on form and light whose influence on Adams

is often attributed by Adams himself and others to Edward Weston is evident also in the work of

one of the first American ‘straight’ or ‘objective’ photographers, Charles Sheeler (1883-1965).

See Mark Rawlinson, Charles Sheeler: Modernism, Precisionism and the Borders of Abstraction, London:

IB Tauris, 2007
39
Robert Adams, Denver: A Photographic Survey of the Metropolitan Area, no page number. Adams

capitalises the work ‘Form’.

40
Adams, Denver, no page number
41
Jenkins, New Topographics, p. 5
42
Bright, ‘Marlboro Men’, p. 6. The essay also appears in Richard Bolton (ed.) The Contest of

Meaning: Critical Histories of Photography, Cambridge, Massachusetts:MIT Press, 1992. I should

 25

point out that Bright has somewhat taken Jenkins’ comment out of context, or more accurately,

forgotten to point out that Jenkins is actually discussing the work of Ruscha and not the

photographs of Adams et al. Whilst this misreading does not entirely diminish the overall force

of Bright’s argument, there is significant difference highlighted by Jenkins regarding Ruscha and

New Topographics.
43
Bright, ‘Marlboro Men’p. 7
44
Walter Benjamin, ‘The Author as Producer’ in Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt, The Essential

Frankfurt School Reader, New York: Continuum, 1994, p. 262

45
I have used Dennis Redmond’s translation of Minima Moralia
(http://members.efn.org/~dredmond/MinimaMoralia.html - Date Accessed 12/5/2016
46
Georg Simmel, ‘The Sociology of the Senses’, in David Frisby and Mike Featherstone (eds.),

Simmel on Culture: Selected Writings, London; Thousand Oaks; New Delhi: Sage, 1997, p. 112-3
47
Simmel, ‘The Sociology of the Senses’, p. 113
48
Beatriz Colomina ‘Double-Exposure: Alteration to a Suburban House, 1978’ in Brigit Pelzer,

Mark Francis and Beatriz Colomina, Dan Graham, London: Thames Hudson, 2001, p. 82
49
Adorno, Minima Moralia, p. 39
50
Adorno, Minima Moralia, p. 38
51
Robert Adams, ‘Towards a Proper Silence: Nineteenth-Century American Photographs of the

American Landscape’, Aperture 98, Spring 1985, p. 6

52
Robert Adams in Carol di Grappa (ed.) Landscape: Theory, New York: Lustrum Press, p. 6
53
Adams, The New West, p. 23
54
William Sharpe and Leonard Wallock, ‘Bold New City or Built-Up 'Burb? Redefining

Contemporary Suburbia’, American Quarterly, Vol. 46, No. 1. (Mar., 1994), p. 4

55
William Bronson, How to Kill a Golden State, Garden City, New York, Doubleday & Company,

Inc., 1968, p. 92. I would like to thank photographer Todd Hido for directing me toward this

book.
 26

56
Bronson, How to Kill a Golden State, p. 92
57
Adams, ‘Towards a Proper Silence’, p. 7
58
John Brinckerhoff Jackson, Discovering the Vernacular Landscape, New Haven and London: Yale

University Press, p. 86
59
Jackson, Vernacular Landscape, p. 86
60
Jackson, Vernacular Landscape, 87
61
Robert Adams, ‘Towards a Proper Silence’, p. 6