Selección de fotos de la exposición de Britt Salvesen?NewTopographics?, que presentada en 1975 diversas fotografías de fotógrafos norteamericanos. Este libro presenta la importancia histórica de la exposición. Se seleccionaron trabajos de la exposición, vistas de instalación, comparaciones contextuales y una lista de comprobación ilustrada del espectáculo.

In 1975 the exhibition 'New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape' crystallized a new view of the American West. The sublime Americana vistas of Ansel Adams were replaced and subverted by images of a landscape inundated with banal symbols of humanity. The essays in this anthology will add an important new dimension to the studies of art history and visual culture.

With his iconic, minimalist photographs of suburban landscape, Lewis Baltz was at the forefront of a revolutionary shift in the medium of photography. Baltzs work exemplifies the ways in which photography started to loose the bonds of its isolation within its own segregated history and aesthetics and began to take its place among other media. In the late 1960s and early 1970s Baltz became fascinated by the stark, man-made landscape rolling over Californias then still-agrarian terrain. His earliest portfolio, The Tract Houses (1971), and his preliminary forays into a minimal aesthetic, The Prototype Works (1967-1976), illuminate his drive to capture the reality of a sprawling Western ecology gone wild. His best known work from the period, The new Industrial Parks near Irvine, California (1974), was followed by two smaller projects, Maryland (1976) and Nevada (1977). In the following decade Baltz published three major books, Park City (1980), San Quentin Point (1986) and Candlestick Point (1989), exploring these themes.

Originally published in 1974, this book is now regarded as a classic book of photography in the pantheon of landmark projects exploring American culture and society.

Frank Gohlke has been a leading figure in American landscape photography for thirty years. Photographing grain silos in Minnesota, the aftermaths of a tornado in Texas and the Mount St. Helens eruption in Washington, and a river¿s quiet course in Massachusetts, his is a career of deep, unbroken contemplation of the land, and of our livelihood and survival within it. And for nearly as long as Gohlke has been photographing the landscape, he has also been writing about it.In the spirit of Henri Cartier-Bresson's seminal book, The Mind¿s Eye, and Robert Adams's Beauty in Photography, Gohlke¿s writings span from the philosophical to the personal. Throughout is his abiding sense of curiosity, an affection for and loyalty to his subject, and an uncanny ability to convey the richness of his experience to readers. In this collected volume, Gohlke¿s talent for photographing the landscape proves rivaled only by his talent for writing about it.

Steve Fitch is among America's most well-known chroniclers of the American West since the days of Easy Rider. He has been photographing examples of the West's changing vernacular landscape and vanishing roadside landmarks for more than 40 years. In his new book, he presents both the ancient and the modern by way of petroglyphs, neon motel signs and hand-painted business signs, drive-in movie theater screens, and radio and cell towers. All of them are now endangered because of the advent of the Interstate Highway System and corporate franchises.In this fascinating and comprehensive account, we are able to join in Fitch's expansive journey, truly an odyssey, as represented in the book's 120 unforgettable photographs, all sequenced to mimic the open road--both during day and night. Fitch explains the project in his informative introduction, in which, interestingly, he suggests that the petroglyphs of the ancient Pueblo people have endured far better and longer than anything made during the last sixty years. Curator Toby Jurovics, in his insightful concluding essay, positions Fitch's work in relation to that of the practitioners of the photographic style known as the "New Topographics" and Fitch's own view of photography as a visual form of cultural anthropology. Vanishing Vernacular: Western Landmarks is sure to become a modern-day classic, a book that will be all the more revered as America and Americans move farther away from the highways of the past. That economy and roadside culture are vanishing like endangered species, but Fitch was along for the ride. In sharing that past, he has been witness to his own form of historic preservation.