PAST EXHIBITION
New Topographics
October 25, 2009—January 10, 2010
Press Release
Los Angeles—The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) presents New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape, a re-examination of the landmark exhibition originally held in 1975 at the International Museum of Photography, George Eastman House, which brought together ten leading photographers: Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Joe Deal, Frank Gohlke, Nicholas Nixon, John Schott, Stephen Shore, and Henry Wessel Jr. New Topographics signaled the emergence of a new approach to describing man’s relationship to the landscape, ultimately giving a name to a photographic movement and style; it is considered the second most-cited photography exhibition in the history of the medium (after the Family of Man of 1955). LACMA’s presentation of New Topographics—the second stop on the exhibition’s major international tour—will be on view at the Broad Contemporary Art Museum from October 25, 2009 through January 3, 2010.
The 1975 exhibition has come to be understood as marking a paradigm shift. Romantic idealization of the landscape gave way to a cooler appraisal, more engaged with the everyday built environment and more attuned to the conceptual issues of the broader art field. Photographs in New Topographics emphasize aspects of the emerging, postwar American landscape: expansive parking lots detailed in Frank Gohlke’s Landscape, Los Angeles (1974); subdevelopment tract housing documented by Robert Adams; idiosyncratic historic motels of Route 66 surveyed by John Schott’s Route 66 Motels series; and industrial parks captured in Lewis Baltz’s New Industrial Parks series.
On view at LACMA is a restaging of New Topographics with more than a hundred photographs, bringing together two-thirds of the work seen in the original Eastman House exhibition, which was curated by William Jenkins in collaboration with the artists. The presentation will be supplemented by some twenty prints and publications by related photographers—many of which will come from LACMA’s collection—to provide greater historical context. Such precursors as Timothy O’Sullivan, pioneer surveyor of the American West, as well as Walker Evans, whose influential “documentary style” was first proposed in the 1930s. The conceptual aspect of New Topographics is illuminated by the photo-based books of Ed Ruscha, a key figure in Jenkins’s catalogue essay, along with Robert Smithson’s published explorations of degraded landscapes, illustrated with his own Kodak Instamatic snapshots.
The exhibition will also feature works from the areas of academia and commerce including the influential publication Learning from Las Vegas (1972) by architects and professors Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, an ode to “the ugly and the ordinary”; Landscape Magazine, established in 1951 by J. B. Jackson, a key figure in the contemporaneous cultural geography movement; and the photographically illustrated trade journals of developers and real-estate agents, often cited as prototypes for New Topographics.
As a contemporary response to the legacy of New Topographics, LACMA has commissioned the Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI) to present an installation dedicated to the theme of oil’s central role in the development of the American landscape. Established in 1994 and based in Los Angeles, CLUI is an educational organization that researches and helps visualize human interaction with the physical landscape. The installation will feature two large format video projection “landscans”—unedited video recordings taken from an aerial view. One depicts the pumpjack fields of Kern County north of Los Angeles, and the other documents Texas City’s vast refineries—both addressing ongoing concerns for environmentalism and land use. The “landscan” recordings are made aerially at low altitude with gyro-stabilized cameras, shown in real time and looped.
An interactive audio tour of New Topographics at LACMA will be available via cell phone in the galleries as well as on lacma.org. Visitors can use their own phones to hear the participating photographers talk about their work, drawing on recordings from the 1970s to the present day.
The LACMA exhibition is curated by Edward Robinson, associate curator of the Wallis Annenberg Department of Photography. New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape premiered at the George Eastman House (June 13–October 4, 2009), and following LACMA’s presentation, will travel to the Center for Creative Photography, Arizona (February 19–May 16, 2010); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (July 17–October 3, 2010); Landesgalerie Linz, Austria (November 10, 2010–January 9, 2011); Photographische Sammlung Stiftung Kultur, Cologne (January 27–April 3, 2011); Nederlands Fotomuseum Rotterdam, the Netherlands (July 2–September 11, 2011); and Bilbao Fine Arts Museum, Bilbao (November 2011–January 2012).
Catalogue
The exhibition catalogue features an essay by LACMA’s recently appointed department head and curator of Photography and Prints and Drawings, Britt Salvesen, which traces the prevailing cultural and aesthetic ideas that gave rise to the exhibition, as well as the interconnections between the participants, offering a broad-based view of the photography world in the mid-1970s. Also featured is an essay by Alison Nordström outlining the significance of New Topographics in the Eastman House’s history and its influence on photographic history to date. The catalogue is published by Steidl and CCP.
Related Public Programs
LACMA’s presentation of New Topographics will be complemented by related public programs, including a talk with exhibition photographer Frank Gohlke, weekly exhibition tours by contemporary Los Angeles-based artists, and a symposium focused on the legacy of the 1975 exhibition.
Conversations with Artists:
Frank Gohlke Sunday, October 25, 2 pm, Brown Auditorium
Free—tickets available one hour before the program at the box office
Photographer Frank Gohlke will present his new publication Thoughts on Landscape: Collected Writings and Interviews, followed by a book signing.
Exhibition Tours
Sundays, November 1–December 13, 2 pm, BCAM, 2nd Floor
Free with the cost of admission—tickets available one hour before the program at the box office
Six leading Los Angeles-based photographers will provide weekly gallery walk-throughs, sharing their personal responses to the legacy of New Topographics: Mark Ruwedel (November 1); Amir Zaki (November 8); Peter Holzhauer (November 15); Shannon Ebner (November 22); Kim Stringfellow (December 6); and Catherine Opie (December 13).
Symposium:
What’s At Stake? New Topographics Photography and the Man-Altered Landscape.
Saturday, November 7, 11 am–4 pm, Bing Theater
Tickets: $10 general admission, $7 museum members/senior (62+), $5 students with valid ID. Tickets will be available in advance—contact box office 323 857-6010 or visit lacma.org.
Morning and afternoon panels will discuss the issue of curatorial re-enactment within art institutions, as well as the legacy of New Topographics as it relates to artistic practice, urban studies, environmentalism, and architecture. Speakers include Matt Coolidge, Douglas Crimp, Norman Klein, Miwon Kwon, Richard Meyer, Edward Robinson, Britt Salvesen, with other special guests to be announced. A special preview screening of Jim Venturi’s Learning from Bob and Denise, a documentary about his parents, legendary architect team Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, will follow. This event is made possible through a collaboration with The Contemporary Project of USC. The Contemporary Project is a multiyear initiative to create new forms of dialogue between the academic
community and the art world.
Credit
This exhibition was organized by the Center for Creative Photography, The University of Arizona, and the George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film. The Los Angeles presentation is made possible through a generous gift from LACMA’s Photographic Arts Council.
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