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Note: thesis: Thesis (Ph. D.)--Brown University, 2019
Genre (aat): theses
Abstract: The 1975 George Eastman Museum exhibition New Topographics redefined the subject of landscape photography as the built environment, but its premise of a “neutral” style remains undertheorized. This dissertation re-analyzes the exhibition’s reception, framing the show as a nexus of the possibilities for making, interpreting, and exhibiting photographs of the American landscape in the 1970s. It proposes that what qualifies New Topographics as a watershed was not its banal subject matter, but rather the interpretive work its photographs placed on viewers. Radically departing from the expressive model of Ansel Adams, these “cool” photographs positioned viewers critically, contributing both to the dismantling of frontier mythology and the theorization of viewership in the 1970s. The dissertation takes the notion of the “significant outlier” as its chapter model. Chapter One theorizes neutrality in photography by way of examining Ed Ruscha’s simultaneous influence and absence in the exhibition. While Ruscha’s 1960s photo books anticipated the style that New Topographics sought to name, their humor and deskilling would have been discordant with the social commentary and masterful print craft in the show. Chapter Two focuses on Robert Adams’s contribution as a way to address the exhibition’s departure from prior models of representing the American landscape. The contrast between his cool aesthetic and Ansel Adams’s warmer, conventionally expressive one emblematizes ecology versus conservation as models of environmentalism. Chapter Three examines how Joe Deal and Lewis Baltz borrowed formal strategies from art in other media to subtly critique suburban and corporate sprawl. I interpret Deal’s square-format, aerial photographs of Albuquerque in light of seriality, and Baltz’s rigorously frontal views of southern California industrial parks as a photographic variant of minimalism. Meanwhile, Chapter Four interprets Stephen Shore’s color photographs as outliers that place pressure on the prevalent association of New Topographics as critical of the built environment; his photographs positioned their audience to view the built environment more sympathetically. Finally, in the dissertation’s epilogue, the reception of Bernd and Hilla Becher’s work and that of their students in the Düsseldorf School of Photography provides a way to chart the influence of New Topographics abroad and into the present.
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Identifier: DOI: 10.26300/kznp-zw81
Access Condition: rights statement (href="http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/"): In Copyright
Access Condition: restriction on access: Collection is open for research.
Type of Resource (primo): dissertations