Reinventing the Genre: New Topographics and the Landscape

Lauren Higbee

History of Photography

Dr. Jolles

12 December, 2011
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Beginning with the rise of photography in the mid-nineteenth century, the United States

has welcomed depictions of the landscape as useful tools in the construction of national identity

myths. For example, photographs of the American West from the 1860s through the 1880s

reinforced the concept of “manifest destiny” namely, white Americans’ right to enjoy and exploit

the land to their benefit. At a time when such myths were losing traction with most Americans,

the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York mounted an exhibition titled New

Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape (1975). This exhibition promoted the

work of ten landscape photographers, three of whom I will examine in this paper. Robert Adams,

Lewis Baltz, and John Schott each assumed a self-consciously objective attitude in his

photographs of residential, industrial, and commercial buildings. Because of the photographers'

documentary-like styles, scholars neglect what I argue to be the most obvious and problematic

aspect of these photographs: the landscape as an icon of American visual identity. I argue that

these photographers were reinventing the landscape genre for the twentieth-century, that is, for

the post-industrial age. Whereas the industrial age was characterized by such major events as

mass production, urbanization, and assimilation, the post-industrial age involved mass

consumerism, suburbanization, and the breakdown of homogenization. The majority of the

photographs in New Topographics do not actually depict the landscape per se, but what

Americans have built on the physical landscape, and its transformations evident in the post-

industrial age. These photographers accomplished this goal without resorting to sentimental

environmentalism characteristic of the 1970s.1

In order to achieve this redefinition of the genre, they chose to reference the forefathers

of American landscape photography: nineteenth-century survey photographers such as Carleton

1 Britt Salvesen, “New Topographics,” in New Topographics; Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape

(Germany; Steidl, 2010), 35. Some of these photographers did go on to engage with environmental art,
specifically Robert Adams. See Finis Dunaway, “Beyond Wilderness: Robert Adams, New Topographics, and
the Aesthetics of Ecological Citizenship,” in Reframing the New Topographics (Chicago: Center for American
Places at Columbia College Chicago, 2010).
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Watkins and Timothy O’Sullivan. In doing so, they utilized three methods developed by their

nineteenth-century predecessors: scientific objectivity, a lack of convention, and the survey.

Though New Topographics photographers have admitted to knowledge of Watkins’ and

O’Sullivan’s work, to date there has not been a substantial study on the matter. I hope to reveal

both formal similarities and methodological departures in the work of Adams, Baltz, and Schott.

The three photographers exemplify the drive to reinvent the landscape genre evident in

the New Topographics exhibition. They were some of the most well-known of the group, having

already published photobooks and exhibited in major venues.2 All photographers in the

exhibition were connected through either the George Eastman House, the nearby Visual Arts

Workshop, or other universities and museums. Also participating were German artist-educators

Bernd and Hilla Becher, Frank Gohlke, Nicholas Nixon, Joe Deal, Henry Wessel, Jr., and color

photographer Stephen Shore.3 Joe Deal was the acting exhibitions manager at Eastman House for

this exhibition and worked closely with curator Williams Jenkins on the show.4 Jenkins had only

a short time in which to plan the exhibition and thus chose only photographers he knew

personally. Perhaps the familiarity between participants and coordinators contributed to the

exhibition’s perceived insularity. In addition to these photographers, Jenkins expressed his

appreciation of Ed Ruscha's photography, writing “Ruscha made his point with such clarity and

renown that his importance as an antecedent to the work under discussion should be obvious.”6

John Schott's series of Route 66 motels in this exhibition evinces similarities to Ruscha’s

Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1963). Jenkins has not written of his reasons for omitting Ruscha’s

2 Salvesen, 56-57.
3 I have chosen to omit color photography from my analysis for the sake of continuity—the addition of color
summons up a catalog of issues not relevant to this paper.
4 John Rohrbach, “Introduction,” in Reframing the New Topographics (Chicago: Center for American Places at
Columbia College Chicago, 2010), xv.
6 William Jenkins, “Introduction,” in New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape (Rochester,
New York: International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House, 1975), 4.
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work from the exhibition.7 Britt Salvesen's chapter in Reframing the New Topographics is

helpful in comparing the works of Shore and Schott to that of Ed Ruscha and Dan Graham,

exploring their use of “commercial photography as conceptual source.”8 However, while many

of the included photographers had also published photobooks, one could argue that Ruscha's

project seems more concerned with the book concept than with the photographs themselves.

Nevertheless, Ruscha is important to Jenkins' conception of the “man-altered landscape.”

It is only within the last five years that scholars have attempted to engage this exhibition

in any substantial dialogue. Individually, many of these photographers had gained positive press

in the art world in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Collectively, however, they proved difficult

for critics. Many reviewers either expressed mystification or disparaged the photographs as

overly cold and defiantly impersonal. In her essay accompanying the 2009 restaging of the

exhibition in coordination with Eastman House and the Center for Creative Photography at the

University of Arizona, Britt Salvesen comments that critics agreed that the exhibition seemed

different and exciting, but that they couldn’t articulate exactly why.9 Many of these

photographers have been included in notable exhibitions since 1975, but evoked little critical

discourse.

As curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, John Szarkowski included Adams,

Baltz, and Henry Wessel, Jr. in his 1978 exhibition Mirrors and Windows. The accompanying

catalogue essay, however, contained no mention of these photographers or the New

Topographics exhibition. Szarkowski also included Adams and Wessel in his 1981 exhibition,

American Landscapes, but again ignored them in the catalogue essay. However, he did write the

foreword to Adams' 1974 photobook The New West. Similarly, many of these photographers

7 Ibid., 5.
8 Britt Salvesen, “Real Estate Opportunities: Commercial Photography as Conceptual Source in New
Topographics,” in Reframing the New Topographics (Chicago: Center for American Places at Columbia College
Chicago, 2010), 71-85.
9 Salvesen, “New Topographics,” 19.
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participated in the 1999 exhibition at the Nevada Museum of Art, The Altered Landscape. In the

introduction to the catalogue, editor Peter E. Poole acknowledges New Topographics as an

important precedent for and influence on this exhibition, which can be seen in the accompanying

plates as many of the New Topographics photographers are included.10 However, this exhibition

involves a decidedly environmentalist bent, engaging ideas of beauty and spirituality in the

landscape, and fidelity to reality in photographs of the landscape.

Until recently, scholars have chiefly relied on original curator William Jenkins’ original

catalogue essay in which he outlines the chief interests of the exhibition as style, objectivity, and

the photograph as document.11 Salvesen’s essay in the updated New Topographics catalogue

expands and deepens Jenkins’ assertions, while providing extensive context for the formation of

the exhibition as well as background on the artists. Salvesen also goes on to highlight selected

influential figures such as documentarian Walker Evans, serialist Ed Ruscha, and the nineteenth-

century American landscape photographers. Additionally, the Center for American Places at

Columbia College Chicago recently published the results of a panel from the 2008 College Art

Association annual meeting as a book titled Reframing the New Topographics. This book further

contextualized this exhibition within the realms of art and film in the 1970s. Toby Jurovics and

Mark Rawlinson's essays for this anthology counter the common belief that the photographs are

unsentimental and unjudging, which seems quite obvious to a contemporary viewer. For

example, the text in Robert Adams' photobooks can be rather precious and often sentimental

about the landscape.12 Finis Dunaway analyzes Adams' engaging landscapes via a burgeoning

environmentalism of the 1970s, focusing on the concept of “ecological citizenship” and the

10 Peter E. Poole, “Introduction,” The Altered Landscape (Reno, Nevada: Nevada Museum of Art, 1999), 1.
11 Most of the early writing on this exhibition has focused on a concern with style and stylelessness as well as the
nature of documentary photography. However, I want to make a clear distinction between traditional
documentary photography and art photography that uses a documentary aesthetic. “Documentary” implies a
practical purpose or a goal, such as that of the FSA project, while “a documentary aesthetic” is simply that—an
aesthetic applied to art photography, which is what the New Topographics artists did.
12 I reproduce some of this text later in the paper.
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influence of urban sprawl and American car culture on the landscape. Greg Foster-Rice discusses

the exhibition in terms of systems theory, that is, the reconsideration of the art object as no

longer autonomous but integrated with and inseparable from society.13 Dovetailing nicely with

Foster-Rice's discussion of systems theory, Kim Sichel takes on the “topographic” with a

discussion of mapping and aerial photography. Larisa Dryansky is the outlier here, relating the

photographs to the films of Michelangelo Antonioni and Jean-Luc Godard. In short, this

anthology provides a broad range of critical interpretations, moving beyond Jenkins' original

thesis, which simply places the New Topographics in the context of photographic history.

In order to discuss how the New Topographics artists rejected the traditional landscape

genre in creating a new post-industrial idiom, it is useful to point out the qualities that comprise a

landscape. Primarily, landscapes exist as horizontal images, with the horizon line at the center or

bottom third of the frame to capture as expansive a view of the land as possible. Adams, Baltz,

and Schott all conform to this convention. Of course, there are several variations of vertical

landscapes by such artists such as Albert Bierstadt and Carleton Watkins depicting tall canyons

or waterfalls, but these are the exception to the rule. Firstly, in the tradition of landscape

painting, the viewer usually has some specific element of the landscape to draw him in, such as a

particularly gnarled tree (as in Thomas Cole’s 1836 painting The Oxbow), winding stream, or

mountain range. Often, this element can be a human figure serving as surrogate for the viewer

through which the viewer can place himself in the painting. These elements generally do not

exist in the New Topographics photographs. Generally, these photographers avoided such

contrivances for the sake of detachment and seeming objectivity. To this end, Foster-Rice’s

chapter also places New Topographics within the context of the contemporary Minimalist

13 Greg Foster-Rice, “Systems Everywhere: New Topographics and the Art of the 1970s,” in Reframing the New
Topographics (Chicago: Center for American Places at Columbia College Chicago, 2010), 45-69. More broadly,
“systems theory” also has applications in fields as diverse as biology and engineering.
 Higbee 7

movement represented by artists Donald Judd and Sol LeWitt.14 Secondly, we expect landscapes

to be beautiful, picturesque or sublime. Landscapes have traditionally been produced in order to

elicit contemplation on beauty, God, mortality, etc. In short, they were intended to be morally

instructive or edifying. Because nature is nonspecific, the viewer can project into it his own

metaphors. New Topographics photographs, however, are roundly unconcerned with conventions

depicting nature as beautiful or peaceful and seek to elicit a very different kind of contemplation

by the viewer, one in which the landscape is not the vehicle of otherworldly thoughts, but in fact

is the subject itself. As a style, New Topographics actually rejects this convention doubly when

photographers ignore precedents in painting as well as in photography. In his chapter of

Reframing the New Topographics, Christopher Burnett formally examines the photographs as the

antithesis to the traditional ideal of the nature-based western landscapes such as the work of

Ansel Adams.15 Thirdly, one generally expects a landscape to be of a singular view or locale that

is particularly beautiful or the site of some historical or mythological event. Adams, Baltz, and

Schott defy this convention in their series of relatively anonymous, interchangeable images.

Through these three qualities taken from nineteenth-century landscape photography—

objectivity, lack of convention, and survey—these photographers reject traditional conventions

of landscape imagery and in doing so, deconstruct the genre to make it work for the post-

industrial, postmodern age.

The key characteristic shared by all these photographers, which allows for confusion with

documentary, is the implication of objectivity. Many of the New Topographics photographers,

including Robert Adams, have declared Walker Evans as their model of objectivity, as one can

see in the image Mobile home, North Glenn, Colorado (1973) (fig. 1). Here Adams presents us

with a straight-on, unmanipulated view of a single mobile home within its camp. The
14
Ibid., 47.
15 Christopher Burnett, “New Topographics Now: Simulated Landscape and Degraded Utopia,” in Reframing the
New Topographics (Chicago: Center for American Places at Columbia College Chicago, 2010), 139-158.
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composition places the trailer squarely in the frame, roughly equidistant from the edges, isolating

it as the clear subject of the photograph. This view, in which the trailer is placed at an angle,

rather than frontally, provides more visual information as to the size of the home. One gets the

feeling that Adams is taking a representative sample of mobile homes in the area, operating with

a concerted effort to eliminate any kind of personal bias in his project. The generic title further

suggests that the photographer seeks to avoid making any judgment or statement on the mobile

home. Instead, he merely presents it as a record of this building and its place in the landscape.

We can consider Timothy O’Sullivan’s photograph Ancient Ruins in the Canyon de Chelly,

Arizona (1873) (fig. 2) in a similar vein. By dint of his employment on a major western land

survey, O’Sullivan’s images are necessarily objective and provide as much information as

possible in a purely disinterested, inexpressive manner. He uses a similar straight-on, frontal

view of the location from a distance, capturing the ruins as well as their physical context. He also

demonstrates an interest in the architectural elements of the landscape—the ruins and the

prominent rock striations.

The absolute objectivity evident in these images places the weight of interpretation

squarely onto the viewer. Adams’ image challenges the viewer to make his own interpretation of

the mobile home’s relation to the contemporarily built landscape. The viewer can extract a

commentary on the environmental effects of westward expansion, the plight of the poor in the

US, or simply an aesthetic interest on the part of the photographer. However, Adams is operating

under an art photography influenced by the aesthetic of Walker Evans’ documentary

photography while O’Sullivan’s photography cannot dissociate itself from its status as actual

document during this period. Adams' photograph must make some sort of statement as to

meaning or signal to the viewer cause for contemplation, even if that means stating a negation of

meaning. O'Sullivan's photograph is not burdened by a similar conflict of meaning because of its
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purported scientific merit and can simply rest on the obvious literal meaning of the object or site

pictured. The Canyon de Chelly requires no external constructions of meaning because of its

purely functional purpose and undetermined future use. However, if we are to believe, as Jenkins

would, that Adams' photograph is purely objective and non-judgmental, then this lack of internal

meaning conflicts directly with the historical drive to establish photography as an independent

art form. Part of this argument emphasizes the artist's control over the image, and his utilization

of control to create a specific effect, either through the artist's hand in the darkroom, as with the

Pictorialists, or through a perfectly artistic negative, as with the f/64 Group and other straight

photography adherents. Either way, the emphasis remains on the artist's creation of effect or

meaning and the ability of the photograph to convey this by itself. Adams, instead, has said that

he wanted to make his photographs “look like they were easily taken,” and Jenkins has

championed their objectivity.16 However this kind of argument, taken to the extreme, returns

photography to the nineteenth-century concept of photography as purely mechanical tool, and

Adams' photographs would be part of a sociological or topographical study. Surely nineteenth-

century photographer, Francis Frith would relegate Adams’ photograph to the realm of

“mechanical photography” rather than “art-photography” if he believed in this absolute

objectivity.17 It is interesting to note that The New West is generally not shelved in libraries with

photography or art, but with sociology. This categorization supports an argument for Adams'

photographs as purely documentary. But if the work was purely documentary, the viewer would

expect some sort of concrete accompaniment to the photograph such as interviews with the

home's inhabitants, or demographic statistics.

Instead, Adams frames his images in the context of a re-appreciation and reinterpretation

of the western landscape, writing in the introduction to The New West, “[t]he mountains still

16 Rohrbach, xviii.
17 Francis Frith, “Art Photography,” in Photography, essays & images: illustrated readings in the history of
photography (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1980), 115.
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synopsize the frontier, though our expectations have matured and the significance of the land has

therefore changed—we want to live with it harmoniously.”18 He provides an intellectual

framework through which to view his photographs, explains his avoidance of the sublime

landscapes of Watkins or Ansel Adams writing “. . . that we do not live in parks, that we need to

improve things at home, and that to do it we have to see the facts without blinking.”19 He

essentially admits that the landscape has changed, perhaps not for the better, but that we have to

learn to live with it. His photographs exemplify the new way we must view the landscape if we

are to come to terms with our current relationship with it. “Paradoxically,” he writes, “we also

need to see the whole geography, natural and man-made, to experience a peace; all land, no

matter what has happened to it, has over it a grace, an absolutely persistent beauty.”20 In making

an artistic statement on this subject, in choosing to take a sort of sociological/geographical study,

and in exhibiting in a museum context and to an art audience, he combines the artistic and the

scientific. In this manner, he conflates conventional artistic genres with documentary

photography and sociology in order to create a new, more inclusive, postmodern manner in

which to view the landscape.

Photographers of the western expansion similarly grappled with how to photograph the

American landscape with few guiding precedents. The New Topographics artists also lacked

conventions for representing the built environment. They were aware of the nineteenth-century

surveys and 1930s FSA work informing their aesthetic, but they had no precedents for the built

environment.21 Nineteenth-century photographers similarly had no precedents for the American

landscape, yet some photographers, such as Carleton Watkins, utilized European models of

landscape painting and photography. For example, Carleton Watkins worked from the tradition

18 Robert Adams, “Introduction,” The New West (Boulder: Colorado Associated University Press, 1974), xi
19 Ibid.
20 Adams, xii.
21 Salvesen, 38.
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of established views of rural or man-made landscapes. His Yosemite Valley, the Best General

View of 1865 capitalizes on the established view as well as the literary concept of the sublime.

Watkins’ image also reflected a clear goal of making money from his photographs through a

blossoming tourist culture. In representing the American built environment, however, Lewis

Baltz has no convention from which to draw. Traditional European views, such as the work of

Francis Frith or Gustave Le Gray, depicted only ancient ruins or gardens, never contemporary

architecture. In his 1974 image Foundation Construction, Many Warehouses, 2891 Kelvin, Irvine

(fig. 3), Baltz photographs the complete opposite of the ruin—ongoing construction. He also

flouts landscape tradition by leaving no human clue as to scale, though he often uses a door or a

parking space as a self-referential and innate marker. He also mostly photographs the exteriors of

office buildings, factories, warehouses, and other commercial ventures. Like the other New

Topographics photographers, Baltz avoids passing judgment or making any overt statement. This

is not a glorifying view of the divine western landscape, nor is it a scathing critique of land abuse

and pollution. Perhaps the photographer is seeking a redefinition of the American industrial

landscape, but he is no reformer such as Jacob Riis or Lewis Hine. Because Baltz’s ultimate goal

is artistic/aesthetic, and not part of a documentary project, the viewer cannot discern the

photograph’s goal. As the photographer must develop a new idiom, so must the viewer discover

for himself how best to view and understand these images.

Baltz takes advantage of the lack of precedent in framing his image to counteract any

familiar tropes or motifs associated with landscape. In fact, Baltz's photographs represent an anti-

sublime. His focus is not on the landscape at all, but the building being erected on top of it.

Rather than transport the viewer to a place beyond himself and foreground his mortality,

Foundation Construction, Many Warehouses harnesses the viewer to the earth, specifically to

this laying of concrete. Rather than idealizing the pristine natural landscape, he shows us an
 Higbee 12

image that seems particularly scarring. The viewer imagines the violence done in construction—

trees leveled and grass uprooted before concrete could be poured into these holes cut into the

ground, almost like a tattoo. The image is taken from street level, rather than from above.

Furthermore, Baltz creates the opposite of the modernist landscape of Ansel Adams or Minor

White. This is not the technically-perfect, pristine focus, and wide tonal range of Adams'

mountain ranges. In fact, this image seems almost over-exposed in order to supplement the

already cold, documentary aesthetic. While Baltz may not inspire awe at nature's beauty, he

provokes contemplation over American renovation of the landscape. He eschews the traditional

“wilderness aesthetic” of Adams and White so that the viewer focuses on the encroachment of

suburban sprawl and mass manufacturing onto the landscape. As Dunaway nicely summarizes,

“Baltz sought to spatialize the mass culture critique by emphasizing how the political economy

of postwar American fundamentally altered the environment and how the dream world of

consumption inscribed its values across the landscape.”22 He makes the point that landscapes do

not have to be beautiful. Baltz's industrial photographs occupy a strange space because they

embody a part of the built environment that we usually associate with cities, whereas his exist

out in the suburbs, on the side of the highway. His warehouse foundations in the suburbs create a

sort of liminal zone between city and country that is neither cityscape nor landscape. Thus, Baltz

works in a new landscape idiom for which there are no precedents.

John Schott could choose from several precedents for his landscape work throughout the

American west, such as Timothy O’Sullivan’s work produced for the Wheeler and King surveys

from the nineteenth-century. His systematic approach to recording these motels, fifteen of which

are represented in New Topographics, recalls the exploratory nature of a survey. Schott takes this

method and turns it into a series, rather than a survey, as all the photographs are clearly

22 Dunaway, 16.
 Higbee 13

interrelated. The photographer sets his parameters in the title of the series, Route 66 Motels, and

records the similarities and differences between all his samples by framing them all in a similar

manner and in a similar style—the documentary aesthetic. While he would have known

O'Sullivan's work, Schott's project was more a comparative study than a fact-finding mission.

O’Sullivan’s images were intended to be informative and descriptive, while Schott’s images defy

any purposeful reading other than an interest in vernacular architecture made popular by Robert

Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour in their 1972 study, Learning from Las Vegas.

His images provide no titles or captions, but invite the viewer to make his own conclusions, a

studied impartiality characteristic of all of the New Topographics artists. Similarly, O’Sullivan’s

image Black Canyon, Colorado River, From Camp 8, Looking Above (1871) is part of a

systematic approach to documenting and classifying elements of landscape and vegetation of the

American west—a process with a definite sort of methodology, if not a clear goal. However,

while O'Sullivan's work generally constitutes a range of samples, Schott's work represents a

survey of one particular type. Furthermore, while Schott’s photographs can convey a significant

amount of visual information, this material is largely useless for anything but a sociological or

architectural analysis.

His seriality is what separates him from a truly documentary or scientific reading; he is

working in a trope made famous by Claude Monet and continued by countless painters and

photographers. The lack of information on his subjects places this project squarely in the realm

of an aesthetic experiment. The seriality in Schott’s work instantly recalls the work of artist Ed

Ruscha. Schott surely would have seen Ruscha’s famous Twentysix Gasoline Stations. Ruscha’s

book is largely playful, experimental, and tongue-in-cheek. Ruscha focuses on the book as a

whole crafted object in itself, rather than as a critique of the homogenization of the American

consumer landscape. Schott's work is closer to Ruscha than to Adams or Baltz as he represents a
 Higbee 14

more positive, less critical view on the American built landscape. For example, William Jenkins

has said that he now wishes he had included Ruscha in the exhibition because “it would have

fleshed out that part of it that’s not quite so photographic,” that is, with an emphasis on irony and

the art object rather than strict critique.23 His work also reflects the legacy of Pop Art with its

interest in kitsch and aggrandization of the everyday to high art. Additionally, it reflects an

interest at the time in vernacular architecture, the architecture specific to a certain culture or

group that arises to meet and reflect that culture’s needs.24 The motels in Schott’s series project

an irreverence toward vernacular architecture, demonstrating a commercialization of the

indigenous architecture of the American southwest.

Also in vogue at this time was genre theory and criticism, a re-evaluation of the

usefulness of genre and its rules and strictures in an artist’s work. This trend arose not in

architecture or art, but in literature. The critique of genre questions the effect of preconceived

notions of genre on the artist, and how they might limit the results. It is possible that an artist

may consciously or unconsciously try to fit his work to the genre, rather than allowing his work

to evolve organically.25 Granted, genres create a framework through which to view certain

artworks, and can be helpful—the work is easier to grasp when we have a handhold. Initially, we

would want to call Schott’s photograph of “Tewa Lodge” a landscape because of its situation

outside, in “nature.” He also isolates one particular viewpoint, rather than a cluster of buildings

that would suggest a cityscape of some kind. We could easily call it a portrait with its relatively

close crop and frontal situation. This kind of merging of genres and categories is characteristic of

a general breaking down of conventions in postmodern art. As John Cawelti has argued, the

breakdown of genre is symptomatic of a breakdown in popular myths, such as the myths of

23 Salvesen, 27.
24 Ibid., 23, 46.
25 Ed. Garin Dowd, Lesley Stevenson and Jeremy Strong, “Preface,” Genre Matters: Essays in Theory and
Criticism (Bristol: Intellect, 2006), 7.
 Higbee 15

manifest destiny, the “American Dream” of homeownership, and American individualism

criticized by photographers involved in New Topographics.26 The death of Greenbergian

essentialism in 1960s opened the door for pluralism in art and in culture. Pluralism would

eventually lead to a lack of concern with the strictures of genre and media in contemporary art.

Ultimately, photographers Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, and John Schott of the New

Topographics exhibition had to grapple with finding a new idiom through which to represent the

built environment. They essentially blew open the genre, establishing the truth that any image

can be a landscape and a landscape can be any image. These photographs do not conform to any

established concept that we have of the landscape, such as Ansel Adams’ imposing of modernist

landscapes of western mountain ranges or Carleton Watkins sublime views of Yosemite. Instead,

the photographers took advantage of three characteristics evident in the work of nineteenth-

century western survey photographers Watkins and O'Sullivan: objectivity in framing the

subject, a lack of precedent or convention, and the concept of the survey as series. The New

Topographics photographers utilized an aesthetic associated with documentary photography of

the 1930s, specifically those photographers working for the Farm Resettlement/Security

Administration under the Works Progress Administration. Specifically, the photographers and

the curator William Jenkins mention Walker Evans as their stylistic source. However, the works

are in no way truly documentary because of the complication of artistic intent and the use of a

documentary style or strategy. These artists discussed and exhibited their work in an art world

context in order to provoke discussion, but not necessarily action. In this way, they created a new

landscape idiom for the twentieth-century, a hybrid genre that reflected the true American

landscape of housing developments, office parks, and endless parking lots.

26
John Cawelti, “Chinatown and Generic Transformation in Recent Films,” in Film Theory and Criticism (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 501.
 Higbee 16

Images

Fig. 1: Robert Adams, Mobile home, North Glenn, Colorado, 1973

Fig. 2: Lewis Baltz, Foundation Construction, Many Warehouses, 2891 Kelvin, Irvine, 1974
 Higbee 17

Fig. 3: John Schott, no title, from the series Route 66 Motels, 1973
 Higbee 18

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