New Topographics Movement

Descriptive word: Realism

“To work in a way integrated with architecture, I think the work we’re speaking about here is not a question of putting my work in his building but a question of using that building and the activities in that building as a way of generating a dialogue in images. The work is not even site-specific, it’s really site-generated. It’s something that’s made exclusively for that space and that space with its present series of functions. In that sense it becomes like most works today ephemeral.”
Lewis Baltz

Grundberg, Andy.  “Review/Photography: Beauty and Challenge in Modern Landscape.”  The New York Times.  13 July 1990, late final ed. : C14. 

Andy Grundberg is a an art critic and administrative chair of photography at the Corcoran College of Art and Design.  In his article in the New York Times, Grundberg compares the aesthetics of the New Topographics Movement to the more contemporary “New American Pastoral” movement.  Grundberg discusses the impact that the New Topographics movement has had on the history of photographic landscapes, especially since Ansel Adams.  Grundberg points out that both the New Topographics and American Pastoral movements take a critical viewpoint when photographing landscapes.  Grundberg also discusses the different ways that artists from these two movements chose to portray the relationship between beauty and the environment.  He states about the two movements that “both reflect photographers' attempts to devise a documentary style able to call attention to environmental issues that defy conventional description.”

 

The New Topographics style has influenced my work in many ways.  It has made me more aware of the juxtaposition of the man-made and nature, and how we choose to view the environment that we live in.  I think the bleak anonymity of the photos in the New Topographics is an interesting departure from the romanticized landscapes that the art world had been accostomed to for so long.   I find it interesting that the desolate, anonymous, sometimes deadpan style of the New Topographics movement is clevery used to generate a narrative, using the buildings as “dialogue.”  This is ultimately my aim in creating a series of photos, but  I have yet to decide on what exactly I am trying to say. 

Images:

http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.mocp.org/collections/permanent/uploads/Baltz2001_5.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.mocp.org/collections/permanent/baltz_lewis.php&h=283&w=430&sz=39&hl=en&start=9&um=1&usg=__6ncbdQwA8Ux92vWNBQHl4HPauPc=&tbnid=GUwc5-PxrU5KFM:&tbnh=83&tbnw=126&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dlewis%2Bbaltz%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26client%3Dsafari%26rls%3Den-us%26sa%3DG