New Topographics

"New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape" was an exhibition that epitomized a key moment in American landscape photography. The show was curated by William Jenkins at the International Museum of Photography at the George Eastman House (Rochester, New York), and remained open to the public from October 1975 until February 1976.

The exhibition had a ripple effect on the whole medium and genre, not only in the USA, but in Europe too where generations of landscape photographers emulated and are still emulating the spirit and aesthetics of the exhibition. Since 1975 "New Topographics" photographers such as Robert Adams,Lewis Baltz,Bernd and Hilla Becher, Frank Gohlke, Nicholas Nixon, and Stephen Shore have influenced photographic practices regarding landscape around the world. Moreover, and as a proof of the impact of this exhibition beyond the American scene, three out of the ten photographers in the show, Baltz, Gohlke, and Shore, were later commissioned by the French government for the Mission de la DATAR.

For "New Topographics" William Jenkins selected eight then-young American photographers: Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Joe Deal,Frank Gohlke, Nicholas Nixon, John Schott,Stephen Shore, and Henry Wessel, Jr. He also invited the German couple, Bernd and Hilla Becher, then teaching at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in Germany. Since the late 1950s the Bechers had been photographing various obsolete structures, mainly post-industrial carcasses or carcasses-to-be, in Europe and America. They first exhibited them in series, as "typologies", often shown in grids, under the title of "Anonymous Sculptures." They were soon adopted by the Conceptual Art movement.

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Wikipedia