Altered Topographies
1
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.
Nicole Soto Rodríguez
Acto #4 Continental Motors, 2015
Nicole Soto Rodríguez, Acto #4 Continental Motors, 2015, from Serie sobre Abandono. Video, color, sound, 10:01 min. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase with funds from the Film and Video Committee 2021.16. © Nicole Soto Rodríguez
In the Abandonment series, Nicole Soto Rodríguez documents herself enacting site-specific choreographic exercises in neglected sites, including the historic Temple Del Maestro building, once the headquarters of the teachers’ union in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and the now-defunct Continental Motors factory in Detroit, the closure of which in the 1990s caused the loss of thousands of jobs. Soto Rodríguez’s performance, which is accompanied by the ambient sounds of birds, the city, and debris crackling underfoot, is a dialogue with the built environment and the now-broken promises of progress these spaces once carried.
Artists
- Robert Adams
- Yuji Agematsu
- Laura Aguilar
- John Ahearn
- Felipe Baeza
- Firelei Báez
- Melvonna Ballenger
- Orian Barki
- Jean-Michel Basquiat
- Meriem Bennani
- María Berrío
- Diane Burns
- Jenny Calivas
- Carolina Caycedo
- Enrique Chagoya
- Tseng Kwong Chi
- Arch Connelly
- Agnes Denes
- Jane Dickson
- Chioma Ebinama
- rafa esparza
- Christina Fernandez
- Teresita Fernández
- Steven Fragale
- LaToya Ruby Frazier
- Dalton Gata
- Aaron Gilbert
- Martine Gutierrez
- Keith Haring
- Bessie Harvey
- Lonnie Holley
- Nancy Holt
- Pao Houa Her
- Donna Huanca
- Peter Hujar
- Suzanne Jackson
- Ulysses Jenkins
- Luis Jimenez
- Michael Joo
- Sonya Kelliher-Combs
- An-My Lê
- Maya Lin
- Miguel Luciano
- James Luna
- Guadalupe Maravilla
- Hiram Maristany
- Leslie Martinez
- Patrick Martinez
- Gordon Matta-Clark
- Keith Mayerson
- Park McArthur
- Ana Mendieta
- Amalia Mesa-Bains
- Mundo Meza
- Alan Michelson
- Troy Michie
- Joe Minter
- Kenji Nakahashi
- Martha Jane Pettway
- Piliāmo‘o
- Piliāmo'o
- Chuck Ramirez
- Sophie Rivera
- Alison Saar
- David Benjamin Sherry
- Trevor Shimizu
- Nicole Soto Rodríguez
- Anita Steckel
- Michelle Stuart
- Kunié Sugiura
- Tabboo!
- Salman Toor
- Rigoberto Torres
- Theo Triantafyllidis
- Artie Vierkant
- Carlos Villa
- Emmi Whitehorse
- Martin Wong
- Purvis Young