Shifting Landscapes

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Altered Topographies

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The term “New Topographics” describes a stark style of landscape photography that debuted in the 1975 exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape at George Eastman House in Rochester, New York. Rather than presenting idealized or transcendent depictions of nature, the artists in the show focused on the mundane and the banal, documenting the effects of industrialization and suburbanization on the American terrain. Robert Adams’s photographic series, for example, recorded the residential spread along the Rocky Mountains in Colorado in a straight-on and detached style.

More recent images of the North American landscape by artists such as Christina Fernandez and An-My Lê carry on this aesthetic tradition but with more pointedly political undertones. Centering the impact of the human-made encroachments of colonization, war, and pollution, these works invoke the lived consequences of such intrusions on both the body and the land, serving as ethical acts of resistance through documentation.

A person runs down a hallway, jumping through a series of open door frames.
A woman in a floral dress leans back over a stair railing in an old building with graffiti on the walls.
Person sitting on a bench in a graffiti-covered, open-air structure with trees visible in the background.
A person in a red dress stands against a graffiti-covered wall in an abandoned, overgrown industrial area.
Person with long hair lying face down on a vast white salt flat, with distant mountains under a clear blue sky.

Artists

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection

View 117 works

On the Hour

A 30-second online art project:
Maya Man, A Realistic Day In My Life Living In New York City

Learn more about this project

Learn more at whitney.org/artport

On the Hour projects can contain motion and sound. To respect your accessibility settings autoplay is disabled.