Download PDF scan of original article

New Topographies: Photographs of a Man-altered landscape. Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Joe Deal, Frank Gohlke, Nicholas Nixon, John Schott, Stephen Shore, and Henry Wessel, Jr. At the International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House, Rochester, N.Y., through Feb. 2.
Accompanied by a catalogue of the same title. 48 pp./$6.95 (sb)

The latest Eastman House exhibition provides us with an opportunity to see some highly interesting photographs. As a curatorial exegesis of what is seen as an important contemporary direction, however, the show falls flat on its face.

The show’s title implies a comparison to the “old topographies” of photography—those geographical, geological and architectural studies produced in greatest abundance in the 1870s and ’80s. With due allowance for considerable diversity between and within bodies of work, early topography can be said to have been the manifestation of two main concerns. The first was an absolute fascination with the technical perfection of the photograph. The process was still relatively new, had a limited number of practitioners and was not reproducible in anywhere near the same sense as it is today—the “clear picture” was still enough of a novelty to dazzle both audience and artist.

It also was the medium most appropriate to description of the appearance of some particular geographical aspect. To contradict what this show’s catalogue introduction says is the essence of a document, the goal was not a statement (picture) about a place, but a statement of the subject. This second concern of the phototopographer is probably the most obvious, and certainly the most important. Though it was largely an economically expedient response to a market, it also had antecedents in painting and other media which were produced in simple celebration of the uniqueness of the real world. It is to whatever degree a contemporary worker displays such an interest and emphasis that he or she may be placed in the genre. Nicholas Nixon’s broad views of Boston, which, in addition to their wealth of detail and simple com position and lighting, are also devoid of emotional appeal, meet both criteria. Whatever purely visual (as opposed to intellectual) interest these pictures have is intrinsic to the subject, or to the tones and sharpness of the contact print. Especially beautiful forms, as with a flowing superhighway in View of Storrow Drive, the River Street Bridge, and the Massachusetts Turnpike, Boston, 1975, are enveloped in so much “setting” that we are never led to attribute their beauty—or even our recognition of it—to Nixon’s treatment. Perhaps the only notable difference between Nixon and, say, T.H. O’Sullivan or England’s James Valentine, is his consistent choice of a high point of view. Use of such a formula accentuates the impression of the camera as a systematic, uncontrollably objective machine, an impression that the early photographers did not have to try very hard to convey.

Joe Deal and Bernd and Hilla Becher also rely upon systems to reduce the impact of the intrusion of their personalities on their work. The Bechers exhibit panels composed of from two to sixteen individual photographs which are either multiple-view studies of a single structure, or collections of specimens brought together to define a type of structure. They actually do call their work typologies, and the attitude behind this, evident from both pictures and titles, is the first example of the increasingly serious contradiction of the exhibition concept by the work exhibited. For, while there are certainly elements of topography in the Bechers’ pictures, the main concern seems to be for subjects as representatives of a class rather than as unique sites needing examination.

In the pictures shown by Deal, we again see the high viewpoint taken by Nixon. But whereas Nixon allows his backgrounds to trail off into an atmospheric haze at the horizon, Deal shoots down at a more severe angle, eliminating the horizon altogether. He states his motives in the catalogue: “The elimination of the vagaries of sky and horizon is partly an attempt to fill the frame and create a self-contained, undifferentiated Space, and is also the elimination of a familiar clue to scale and orientation…” This anti-topographic statement is reinforced by certain pictures (one view of Boulder City is divided into at least a dozen horizontal slices by parallel telephone wires, shadows, roads and striations in the land), and even by the order in which the pictures are hung on the wall, which relies upon a formal correspondence between the prints. (Deal, as director of exhibitions at IMP/GEH, may have had a certain amount of influence, direct or indirect, on the design of the show.)

What appears in Deal’s work to be a coincident interest in lines and shapes becomes the object for Lewis Baltz. Though the approach in his study, The New Industrial Parks near Irvine, California (from which all the Baltz photos in the show are taken), is quite systematic, the end result is a collection of stunningly beautiful abstractions which are more closely related to the “Modern Art” conception of the two-dimensional object of intrinsic value than to the nineteenth century—and current—obsession with subject matter.

In their transformation of what we would ordinarily prejudge mundane into beauty, Baltz and Robert Adams achieve what might be considered the same end. But Adams gives a clear indication of their essential difference in this statement from the introduction to his book, The New West (Colorado Associated University Press, 1974): “We… need to see the whole geography, natural and man

made, to experience a place; all land, no matter what has happened to it, has over it a grace, an absolutely persistent beauty.” One of Baltz’ more striking photographs, his East Wall, Western Carpet Mills, 1231 Warner, Tustin, 1974, is a presentation of alternating bands of light and dark tones, separated from the blank sky by the precise, elongated rectangle of a windowless warehouse or factory, itself composed of equal strips of light and dark grey. In contrast, the beauty Adams shows us is that of a mountain or a plain, only slightly altered by the incongruous structures that sit on top of the land. Thus, to the extent that Adams supplies us with a window through which we may examine the Colorado Front Range, he fits the category of “topographer.” That he does not rest in that pigeon-hole too comfortably, though, is due to the fact that it is quite obviously not simple delineation that he is attempting, but the promotion of a new perception of the world we’ve been given to live in. To quote Adams again:

The subject of these pictures is in this sense, not tract homes or freeways but the source of all Form, light. The Front Range is astonishing because it is overspread with light of such richness that banality is impossible. Even subdivisions, which we hate for the obscenity of the speculator’s greed, are at certain times of day transformed to a dry, cold brilliance.

The work of Frank Gohlke, too, invites comparison with that of Baltz, this time because of its frequent emphasis on the formal aspects of his subject matter, though Gohlke’s compositions are much less severe, the geometry softened slightly by the inclusion of diagonals (rare in Baltz) or even further relieved by the admittance of clouds into his skies. Again, it is the tendency to abstraction which precludes Gohlke’s classification solely as a recorder of information.

The inclusion of the Route 66 Motels series done by John Schott in 1973 is so strikingly antithetical to the theme that if the prime mover of “New Topographics,” Eastman House’s assistant curator of twentieth century photography William Jenkins, was not so insistent upon the “non-judgmental” quality of the work in the show, one would be tempted to dismiss the title as a catchy phrase that was never meant to be taken very seriously. The Schott pictures are a judgment of American society, or of a certain aspect of it. The pseudo-adobe facades and garish neon signs which he has sought out compose, especially when paired with his series of the same year on Philadelphia Mummers, a picture of the artificial world of plastic in which we imagine the bourgeois middle American to be wallowing. His selectivity in choosing only the funniest and funkiest buildings (including the motel composed of a number of separate concrete tepees, each with its own television antenna) belies the objectivity one demands of a scientist.

Photographs in color have the potential of being the most “accurate” type of still picture, in terms of faithful physical description of the object under study. Our perception of color, however, is tied to connotations and nuances of meaning which make its use as a pictorial element subject to a great amount of emotional variation and manipulation. Stephen Shore makes use of this quality, some times as an extra layer of content, at other times as the substance of a picture itself. Color as an attribute of the objects depicted is often purely incidental; what Shore seems most interested in is late-one-summer-afternoon-in-Montana gold as it rakes across a downtown intersection (2nd Street East and South Main Street, Kalispell, Montana, 8/22/74), or the cool, damp green of grass, house and air in a shaded front yard (West Avenue, Great Barrington, Massachusetts, 7/12/74). While one could argue that interpretation of the type engaged in by Shore gives us what is ultimtely the most comprehensive impression of a place, the price we have to pay is a reliance on his interpretations and impressions.

All of the images in this exhibition do share certain characteristics. Man-made structures, most often buildings, appear in each of them, and from this it follows that each includes a certain number of angular, geometric forms. All are more or less “straight” technically, rendering an untampered-with piece of reality in a full range of tones (or colors), with a minimum of picture manipulation beyond selection and framing. In short, these pictures look somewhat alike. Curator Jenkins begins his catalogue introduction with a disclaimer based upon this simple fact:

There is little doubt that the problem at the center of this exhibition is one of style. It should therefore be stated at the outset that while this introduction will concern itself with the exhibition as a stylistic event, the actual photographs are far richer in meaning and scope than the simple making of an aesthetic point.

Yet even if these photographs were formally very close to one another—which they are not—their mere visual similarity would be a rather shaky foundation upon which to build a show. Jenkins, perhaps recognizing this, postulates a philosophical harmony among the exhibitors: a “viewpoint, which extends throughout the exhibition, (that) is anthropological rather than critical, scientific rather than artistic.” (The relation between anthropology and topography is never explained.)

The pictures simply do not bear out this contention of unity. The work of Henry Wessel, Jr., is the supreme example of the distortion produced by forcing a uniquely shaped peg through the square hole of the theme. Far from being described, many of the buildings and cityscapes depicted are partially obscured by tall vegetation, link fences, porch railings and the like. The context of the pictures saps their humor in compelling us to consider them as collected bits of information. Worst of all, the exhibition’s organizers have excluded certain pictures, apparently on the basis of their incompatible subject matter, thus adapting Wessel to their concept and ignoring work which would help to clarify his recent concern for surfaces, and their translation into photographs. (The Adams work may have been subjected to the same kind of editing. His book, which was published in the same year as the latest of his photographs shown here were made, includes, for example, some minimally peopled landscapes. No such pictures are exhibited.) Even the very lack of titles and dates on the Wessel prints indicates a rather different attitude from those who meticulously detail the time and place of each exposure.

It is the curator’s responsibility to study, and then help us to understand, the work he shows. While there may very well be a “new topography,” and while it is an active element in some of the photographs currently at George Eastman House, we—and the artists—are owed a more detailed consideration, which would include thought about differences as well as similarities, and which would, above all, remain true to the artists’ intentions.

“New Topographies” will travel to the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles for a March-April, 1976, showing. It will then open at Princeton University Art Museum on June 22, where it will be on view through Sept. 3.