Reframing Landscape: 50 Years after New Topographics

The 1975 exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-altered Landscape at the George Eastman House in Rochester concretized an emerging tendency in landscape photography that included artists such as Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Bernd and Hilla Becher, and Stephen Shore. These photographers sought to demystify the national imaginaries of the "American West" on which the United States was built. Their cameras brought into view a "New West'' made up of suburban homes, strip malls, industrial parks, and endless highways. These landscapes revealed the destructive incursions of capitalism on the natural and built environment, which were all too often overlooked or ignored. By documenting these ordinary places through a purportedly objective lens, the photographers in New Topographics fundamentally redefined the scopic regime of landscape and its relationship to land.

Taking a retrospective view on the exhibition, this panel invites papers that consider the shifting contours of the term "landscape" in and around New Topographics. How did this new form of landscape photography reframe the aesthetic category of landscape and set it to different kinds of ideological work? How did it both build upon and push back against previous representations of the "American" landscape? How did the documentary aesthetic and semiotics of objectivity shape the development of landscape photography? And how has landscape photography been taken up as a critical tool for shedding light on social, political, and environmental issues? We are especially interested in papers that situate landscape photography in relation to histories of architecture, urbanization, infrastructure, extraction, and capitalism.