New Topographics

Robert Adams. "From Lookout Mountain, at Buffalo Bill's Grave. Jefferson County, Colorado" 1970. Gelatin silver print, 11 x 14 inches.


"...in many of the photographic canvases of Robert Adams and Lewis Baltz square, instead emphasizes the domestic containment of the land. Further, landscape's traditional midline placement of the horizon for compositional balance between earth and sky is often repositioned by New Topographics photographers above or below midline, or is even absent, rendering the landscape cold and cluttered, unbalanced, or constrained rather than pristine and endless."

-Kelly Dennis


"while New Topographics photographers appear to be of western landscapes, trees, deserts, houses, roads, and construction, they are nonetheless about the aesthetic discourse of landscape photography, about "a man-made wilderness" (Ratliff, 1976, p. 86): that is, they are about the American myths of the west, suburban expansion, the American Dream, and the exploitation and destruction of natural resources."

-Kelly Dennis

Dennis, Kelly. "Landscape and the West: Irony and Critique in New Topographic Photography." UNESCO Univsersity and Heritage 10th International Seminar (2005). Web. 7 Apr. 2010. .