New American Topographics
Larry Cusick & Richard Harrison
Fifty years ago (1975), William Jenkins curated an exhibit of 10 photographers for the Eastman International Museum of Photography in Rochester, New York. He titled the show New Topographics: Photographs of a Man Altered Landscape. All the photographs depicted landscapes that included tract homes, abandoned buildings, parking lots, and other human encroachments. He eschewed the romanticized idyllic view of landscape photography as exemplified by say Ansel Adams for what he called stylistic anonymity that was being expressed by a young generation of photographers including Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, and Stephen Shore, among others.
The show challenged the viewer with the simultaneous existence of harmony and discord, of beauty and ugliness (Adams). The critics of the day were puzzled by the apparent banality of the images seemingly devoid of emotion. The photographs seemed documentary and simple without the traditional notion of natural beauty. And yet, the exhibit inspired generations of others to follow this artistic path.
The New Topographics exhibit is now regarded as one of the most important photography exhibits in the 20th century. Britt Salvesen says that it was arguably the last traditionally photographic style and the first photo-conceptual style. And it continues to this day, a genre of photography with a wide array of practitioners. Larry Cusick and Richard Harrison are among those practitioners.
We regard the 1975 exhibit as a stepping off point to explore urban and rural landscapes with an eye for the accidental beauty in human artifacts embedded in the natural world. Robert Adams described beauty as another word for wholeness, meaning the elements of the frame come together to make a cohesive whole. With this point of view, beauty is all around us. We just need to look. And in looking we see. Then we photograph what we see.
There is the sublime in the liminal space. The abandoned building calls us. Its very austerity is its beauty. An empty parking lot pulls us in because it is a human presence with no human there. Roads and train trestles beckon us to imagine human intrusion of nature. The photographic image of a collection of tract homes is beautiful because it codifies the whole from the parts. As Robert Adams said, “No place is boring if you’ve had a good night’s sleep and a pocket full of unexposed film.”
Larry Cusick –
My Exploratory Discovery of the New Topographics by Larry Cusick.
I regard myself as a serious photo dabbler. Seemingly a contradiction in terms, and yet it appears to me to be accurate. I took a photojournalism course in college and dabbled thereafter with point-and-shoot cameras while pursuing a career and raising a family. Then about eleven years ago, I purchased a digital camera with the idea of taking bird photos. It was fun to go on bird walks and share bird photos with fellow travelers.
Bird photography is still something I do. But like any dabbler, I started to branch out. Street photography with people started to intrigue me, and by natural extension, urban photography without people. This could be buildings, silos, crumbling warehouses, tract homes, road intersections, bridges, etc. Just about anything that proclaimed human presence was fair game for a picture. I found lots of inspiration from the images I discovered on social media. There I saw the banal and mundane presented in a passive way that spoke softly to the beauty of liminal space. I found this a very natural artistic direction for me. I took photographs and asked questions later. I came across a website that described the New Topographics photographers from the late twentieth century. The images I saw reflected what I liked to photograph. I found a home.
The New Topographics exhibit in 1975 gave a name to what several photographers were doing at the time…photographs of a man-altered landscape. Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Stephen Shore, and others were exploring the architectural reality of 1970s urban America. They challenged the very idea of beauty. They asked the viewer to embrace parking lots and tract homes as a meaningful artistic vocabulary. It was a striking departure from what came before in the photographic art world. I took it up and started to explore this very vocabulary.
The minimalistic images of Lewis Baltz taught me to see beauty in the ordinary. His black and white photos of architecture seemed rudimentary to me at first. But I now see a curious beauty there. I continue to look for simplicity in much of my own work, inspired by Baltz’s approach.
The color work of Stephen Shore found a place in this genre despite the almost complete dominance by monochrome photographs at the time. Shore’s use of color gave a permission slip for color art photography in urban landscapes. I am continually inspired by his use of color and how it amplifies his images. I use color when I see it as part of the story. I use monochrome when the geometry/texture is the story.
Robert Adams’ expansive images of tract homes and other vernacular architecture in the American west provides as good a definition of New Topographics as any paragraph could. It is a beauty that is not initially apparent. I strive to see and render the beauty in the way that Adams saw and recorded.
The New Topographics has been, for me, a mindset. It is a mindset that sees beauty in places where one does not necessarily expect beauty. I look for interesting shapes and patterns, textures, accidental juxtapositions, or anything that catches my eye. Every time I go out to take pictures I find something to photograph. I could be taking a walk in my neighborhood or a drive out of town. Those early New Topographic photographers taught us to see a different kind of beauty. I try very hard to see the inherent beauty in everything.
Richard Harrison –
Rediscovering the Quiet Beauty: My Journey with New Topographics
It was the late 1970s, and I found myself in a quiet library, flipping through the pages of a photography magazine. This was the moment I first encountered images from the now-famous “New Topographics” exhibit in New York. These photographs shocked me with their stark, unremarkable subject matter—mundane scenes that felt almost defiant in their ordinariness.
What began as confusion turned into curiosity, and then, unexpectedly, admiration. As I studied the images, a subtle beauty emerged—a beauty rooted in the everyday and the overlooked. The photographs did not shout for attention; they whispered, urging me to pause, to truly see. They revealed a world I had unknowingly trained myself to ignore, a world shaped by the quiet elegance of the ordinary. It was as though they insisted, “Look at me. Study me. Take my picture.”
In that moment, my perspective shifted, and I set out to create photographs that was in harmony of this newfound way of seeing.
Those early attempts were humbling. Equipped with my Nikon F2 loaded with black & white film, I approached my work with the conservatism typical of the time, mindful of each frame. Yet my images lacked the impact I had envisioned. They felt pedestrian, more like casual snapshots than reflections of the poetry I saw in my mind’s eye.
It was disheartening. By the late 1980s, frustrated with my inability to replicate what I admired, I began to slow my efforts. My dream of creating New Topographics-inspired work sat quietly on the shelf, waiting.
Years later, on a chilly October morning, I ventured into a small town armed with a new digital camera. The streets were wrapped in fog, and I roamed aimlessly, capturing scenes as they struck me. This morning, I approached the visual world not with the weight of expectation but with the joy of experimentation.
When I reviewed my images that afternoon, something caught me off guard. Several of the photographs seemed to embody the spirit of New Topographics. There was only one problem—they were digital and in color.
For years, I had attempted to imitate the black-and-white aesthetic of the original New Topographics photographers. But as I revisited the work of Stephen Shore, a realization struck me: I was suppressing my true creative instincts. Color was not just a detail—it was central to my vision. I had been trying to translate my vision into a language that was not my own. That foggy morning, I finally began to see my work for what it could be: an authentic expression of my voice, not a replication of someone else’s.
The past decades have been an ongoing process of discovery and refinement. Through trial, error, and persistence, I have come to understand the importance of embracing my unique perspective. Photography has taught me to find beauty in unexpected places, and it is my hope that the images I have created will inspire others to pause, look closely, and see the extraordinary within the ordinary.
www.newamericantopographics.com
