lumogeny

Styles / Documentary & reportage

New Topographics

1970–present. Also called Man-altered landscape photography or topographic photography.

Where the lights stand
seen from above1 sun, highcameraSchematic, not to scale
  1. Key: the sun, about 45° to the camera’s left, high, hard.

Key high: about 30–45° above eye level, angled down. Open shadows: bright surroundings (walls, ground, sky) fill them; no reflector needed.

Schematic, not to scale: worked out from the style’s choices. No set-up of this style has been rendered yet.

Where you have seen it

The photographs that define it are still in copyright, so they are linked below rather than shown.

The land as people have changed it: tract houses, industrial parks, motels, parking lots, grain elevators and the edges of towns, photographed level and from a middle or far distance, square-on or along a low horizon, in plain high sun or overcast light. Everything is sharp and the prints are straight, small and mostly black and white. Nothing is dramatised and the single frame shows no opinion; the meaning builds in the series and the book. The curator called it neutral, a matter of stylistic anonymity.

Shoot sheet for your kit The photographs

How the look is made

  1. Photograph the ordinary built landscape at the edge of town, not the sublime or the picturesque one.
  2. Stand back with the camera level and the verticals vertical; frame square-on, or along a low, straight horizon.
  3. Use plain daylight, high sun or overcast, and keep everything sharp so that no detail becomes the subject.
  4. Leave people out or small; show what they built and left.
  5. Print straight and modestly, and let the series carry the argument.

Shoot sheet for your kit

Fill in your camera, lenses and lights, and the sheet says which light plays each part, what to work around and where to start on your camera. Without a kit it starts on a full-frame camera.

Step 1

Light

1 sun, highcameraSchematic, not to scale

  1. Key: the sun, about 45° to the camera’s left, high, hard.

  • Key high: about 30–45° above eye level, angled down.
  • Open shadows: bright surroundings (walls, ground, sky) fill them; no reflector needed.
Shadow edges
Shadows with crisp outlines, cast by a small or distant light: direct sun, a bare flash, a spotlight. Shadows that fade gradually from light to dark, cast by a large or diffused light: a window, a softbox, a cloudy sky.
Shadow depth
Shadows kept light and full of detail by a reflector, a fill light, bounce or bright surroundings (a low lighting ratio, up to about 3:1: the shadow side at most a stop and a half darker).

How the style is lit

  • High midday sun or bright haze, with short shadows on walls and roads.
  • An overcast sky that evens out every surface.
  • No flash or added light.

This plan is worked out from the style’s choices, so it is drawn as a schematic. One way to get the light, not a record of how any photograph was lit.

Step 2

Lens and settings

Start at

40 mmf/2.81/2000 sISO 100

On a full-frame camera: the same depth of field and exposure as the style’s own numbers, in the same light. Then meter and adjust.

  • The style’s f/23 on 8 × 10 in gives about the depth of field of f/3 on full frame.
Then
28–55 mm · f/8–f/64 · 1/125–1 s · ISO 6–400 on 8 × 10 in, inferred from the gear and the look. Formats are documented: Baltz's Leica on ASA 6 microfilm on a tripod, Adams's Rolleiflex then Pentax 6×7, Nixon's and Shore's 8×10, the Bechers' 13×18 cm Plaubel at ASA 25 for 10 s–1 min. Normal lenses, f/8 on 35 mm to f/64 on 8×10 and most shutter speeds are inferred.
White balance
Mostly black and white; the colour work is daylight-balanced 8×10 negative in plain daylight, printed straight with no warming or cooling cast (inferred).
Focal length
Roughly the eye’s own perspective; no visible distortion.
Focus
Everything sharp from the nearest stone to the horizon.
Rendering
Verticals kept vertical with camera movements or correction.
Angle
The camera at the height of a standing person or of the subject.
Distance
Standing well back; people are small.
Balance
The subject faces the lens; planes run parallel to the picture.
Depth
A strong horizon splits the frame into bands.
Duration
An unmoving scene, exposed slowly and carefully.
Step 3

Direct

Usually no one is in the frame. When people appear they are small and far off, seen whole from a distance: walking across a lot, standing in a yard or getting into a car, going about their business without noticing the camera, never posed, gesturing or looking for the lens.

Without a pose
No people at all, or people so small or far off that their pose does not read (hands alone are Hands alone).
With the sitter
Neutral, unemotional and distant.
The set-up
The same kind of subject, photographed the same way, many times.
Step 4

Style the set

Nothing is styled, moved or tidied: tract houses, yards, parking lots, industrial units and roadsides are shown exactly as built and left, with raw earth, tyre tracks, young trees and litter; anyone who appears wears their own everyday clothes.

How much is styled
Nothing dressed, made up, moved or added for the picture.
Step 5

Finish

Monochrome
Rich blacks, clean whites and every grey between.
Film
A view camera on a tripod: great detail, slow and deliberate. Roll film in a medium-format camera, often square.
Texture
Smooth tones with no visible grain.
Post-production
Nothing changed beyond exposure and development.
Shown as
Pictures made and shown as a set.
Shown in
The book as the main form of the work.

Stay away from golden hour, shallow depth of field, tilted angle, composite & montage, directed scene & tableau, glamour & aspiration, monumental & heroic, storm & dramatic sky, light beams, smoke & dust and coloured gels.

Before you shoot it

Several of the photographers are living artists: never prompt by their names or recreate their pictures.

Where to see it

From open collections, shown whole with their credits. Later photographs are linked, not shown, while they are in copyright.

In copyright, so linked

With other styles

Pairs with Düsseldorf School of Photography. The Bechers link the two: when a New Topographics series needs a wall, scale it up and move to colour the Düsseldorf way, keeping the level, neutral view.

Pairs with New Color photography.

The opposite: Light and airy. Light and airy backlights a pretty subject in warm, hazy sun; New Topographics refuses both the pretty subject and the flattering light.

Sources

  1. New Topographics, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Topographics (title, venue, October 1975 – February 1976, curator William Jenkins, the ten photographers and their subjects, 168 prints, Shore the only colour, formats per photographer, Ruscha's books, Atget, Evans, O'Sullivan and Jackson as influences, Jenkins's 'neutral' and 'stylistic anonymity', 2009 restaging and tour)
  2. Robert Adams (photographer), Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Adams_(photographer) (The New West, 1974; Denver, 1977; What We Bought, 1970–1974)
  3. Lewis Baltz, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Baltz (The New Industrial Parks near Irvine, 1974; monochrome, minimalist photographs of suburban landscapes and industrial parks)
  4. Lewis Baltz, Corona del Mar, Art Institute of Chicago: https://www.artic.edu/artworks/200882 (the Prototype Works: 'subarchitecture', minimalist forms, a print nearly devoid of shadows)
  5. Lewis Baltz, Irvine, Art Institute of Chicago: https://www.artic.edu/artworks/38784 (1971 print, 15.2 × 22.6 cm)
  6. Frank Gohlke, Grain Elevators, Series II, Belmond, Iowa, Art Institute of Chicago: https://www.artic.edu/artworks/118933 (1972, square print)
  7. Nicholas Nixon, View North from the Prudential Building, Boston, Art Institute of Chicago: https://www.artic.edu/artworks/212178 (1975, 8×10 print)
  8. Robert Adams, New Housing, Colorado Springs, Colorado, Metropolitan Museum of Art: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/259841 (1968 print, 14.7 × 15.2 cm: small, near-square prints)
  9. Jeff Rian, Last interview of Lewis Baltz with Jeff Rian, L'Oeil de la Photographie, 2015: https://loeildelaphotographie.com/en/last-interview-of-lewis-baltz-with-jeff-rian/ ('I used a Rolleiflex or a Leica. Everything I shot until about 1980 was simple 35mm film'; 'I used Agfa paper and 35mm microfilm'; 'If the average film was ASA 125, it was ASA 6, which means you had to use it on a tripod, outdoors, on a sunny day'; lenses not sharp 'until F5.6 or -8'; five bracketed exposures per subject; prints about 7 × 9 in)
  10. Lewis Baltz and David Campany in Conversation, davidcampany.com: https://davidcampany.com/lewis-baltz-david-campany-conversation/ (asked whether 'the industrial parks, or maybe all your photographs up to that point' were shot on 35 mm and very slow film: 'They were all shot on a Leica using microfilm developed for continuous tone', at 'really low ASA, like five or seven? Yep.')
  11. Tod Papageorge, Robert Adams: The Missing Criticism, reposted by American Suburb X, July 2011: https://americansuburbx.com/2011/07/robert-adams-missing-criticism-what-we.html (from 1968 a hand-held Rolleiflex making 2¼-inch square negatives; from 1973 a Pentax 6 × 7 cm reflex camera 'became his workhorse', with a Hasselblad for interiors; a tripod-mounted view camera for White Churches of the Plains and Hispanic Colorado; nearly five hundred rolls for the Denver project)
  12. View of Battery Plaza, New York City, from the series City Views (1975–1976), Fundación MAPFRE collections: https://www.fundacionmapfre.org/en/art-and-culture/collections/nicholas-nixon/city-views-1975-1976/view-of-battery-plaza-new-york-city/ (after moving to Brookline near Boston in 1974, 'Nixon settled on an 8-x-10-inch view camera'; the print needs no further magnification)
  13. Stephen Shore, Lapis Press release for New York, 1974 (2023): https://lapispress.com/usr/library/documents/main/artists/59/shorepressrelease.pdf ('I spent the summer of 1974 traveling across America, photographing with an 8 x 10 view camera')
  14. Bernd and Hilla Becher, Wikipedia, citing Jeff L. Rosenheim, Bernd & Hilla Becher (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2022): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernd_and_Hilla_Becher (a 6×9 cm camera, then after 1961 mostly a Plaubel Peco 13×18 cm monorail camera; lenses from 90 mm to 600 mm; glass plates, then 25 ASA sheet film around 1970; usually two exposures per view, 'from 10 seconds to a minute'; overcast days or a blue filter)
  15. New Topographics, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Topographics (about half the photographers used 8×10 view cameras; Deal and Gohlke square medium format; Baltz and Wessel 35 mm)

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