Thursday 4 --- Altered

Forest 70B. 2007. C-print. Kim Keever

West 35aa, Cprint. Kim Keever

"Though not well attended, the 1975 New Topographics exhibition became an art world phenomenon. “Everyone knew everything about it but no one had ever seen it,” said Eastman House curator Alison Nordstrom. “I think it gave [photographers] permission to be more experimental. It gave people permission to be less concerned with the beautiful and more concerned with the true.” Certainly, the photographers in the show took truth seriously. Images like Frank Gohlke’s Landscape, Los Angeles, in which a telephone pole and a bush are the image’s motionless protagonists, or Robert Adams’s serial images of modest tract homes, in which unassuming structures stand on otherwise rural landscapes, seemed to be precious scientific documents. Through their deference to the sprawling natural terrain, they also seemed to suggest that the land, not the man-made structures imposed on it, would eventually have the last say."

-Catherine Wagley

"This group of artists summarized a new attitude about photography with the use of ‘man-altered landscape’ as their subject. Rather than view the sublime and mythic aspects of the land, they produced landscapes that signified their scientific detachment and implied the contemporary issue of conservation. For these artists, ‘topographics’ referred to mapping and measurement, which they emphasized by focusing their cameras on the land being encroached upon by civilization."

-Sheryl Conkleton

bib:

Conkleton. Sheryl. New Topographics: Photographs of a Man Altered Landscape. http://www.henryart.org/exhibitions/past/195/1998

Wagley, Catherine. Landscape Revisited. Nov. 12th, 2009. http://blog.art21.org/2009/11/12/landscape-revisited/