The show was called New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape<\/a>), and it ran from October 1975 to February 1976 at the International Museum of Photography at the George Eastman House. William Jenkins, the assistant curator of 20th-century photography, organised it in consultation with Joe Deal, then the museum\u2019s exhibitions manager. Ten participants: Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Joe Deal, Frank Gohlke, Nicholas Nixon, John Schott, Stephen Shore and Henry Wessel Jr. Eight young American photographers plus the German couple, the only non-Americans in the room. 168 photographs of parking lots, suburban tract homes, industrial parks, motels, downtown buildings, grain elevators and coal mines, rarely with any people in them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Adams was out in suburban Colorado where the tract houses were spreading, Baltz in the new industrial parks of Southern California, Schott on Route 66 with its motels, Nixon in downtown Boston, Gohlke with the grain elevators, Deal with the suburbs going up around Albuquerque, Wessel with the everyday West, and Shore with ordinary American streets.<\/p>\n\n\n\n About half the photographers used 8\u00d710 view cameras and printed at roughly the same size. Deal and Gohlke worked in square medium format. Baltz and Wessel shot 35 mm. The Bechers printed at the European standard of 30\u00d740 cm. And in 1975 colour was still considered commercial rather than serious art, so Stephen Shore worked in colour alone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Jenkins\u2019s catalogue introduction set the scene. The pictures were \u201cneutral\u201d, he wrote, \u201creduced to an essentially topographic state, conveying substantial amounts of visual information but eschewing entirely the aspects of beauty, emotion, and opinion\u201d<\/a>. But the common thread was \u201ca problem of style\u201d, a \u201cstylistic anonymity\u201d that amounted to an apparent absence of style. He framed the show as documentary rather than polemical, \u201cmore anthropological than critical, scientific rather than artistic\u201d. Photography\u2019s real gift, he argued, was \u201cits ability to describe something accurately and in detail\u201d, and that meant the photographers had to get out of their own way: \u201cthey must not allow personal inflection or opinion to stand in its way\u201d. Jenkins was asking, in effect, whether it was possible to make pictures without style. All ten of them had a go.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The idea had a clear lineage, and Jenkins was open about it. He took the title and its disengaged attitude from Ed Ruscha\u2019s self-published photobooks: Twentysix Gasoline Stations<\/em> (1963), Various Small Fires<\/em> (1964), Thirtyfour Parking Lots<\/em> (1967), deadpan, styleless treatments of mundane subjects. Ruscha wasn\u2019t in the show, but his books were its patron saints. Behind Ruscha stood Eug\u00e8ne Atget and Walker Evans, both of whom had recorded the built vernacular landscape, and behind the Bechers stood the German New Objectivity of August Sander and Albert Renger-Patzsch. From the late 1950s the Bechers had photographed disused industrial structures across Europe and America, presenting series they called \u201ctypologies\u201d, often in grids under the heading \u201cAnonymous Sculptures\u201d. And the word \u201ctopography\u201d itself was chosen deliberately, to reach back to the 19th-century survey photographers Timothy O\u2019Sullivan and William Henry Jackson, who documented the federal expeditions opening the West. Topography means mapping. It doesn\u2019t mean romance. That one word explains the whole approach.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s easy to misremember them as drab. They\u2019re not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Look at Robert Adams\u2019s Tract House, Boulder County, Colorado, 1973<\/a>. A new house in a raw yard, fake half-timbering, a hard noon shadow thrown straight down. Ordinary daylight, the kind you normally avoid. The picture gives you everything and nothing, and the longer you look, the more you see: the builder\u2019s haste, the optimism, the emptiness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Joe Deal\u2019s Untitled View (Albuquerque), 1974<\/a> is square, and the horizon is gone. Deal shot downwards, tilting the ground up until the houses and streets lie flat on the frame like features on a topographical map. Nearly like builder\u2019s models.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Lewis Baltz\u2019s South Wall, Mazda Motors, 2121 East Main Street, Irvine<\/a> is a blank corporate wall with a name on it, shot on 35 mm Kodak Technical Pan, a slow, fine-grained film that he enlarged to 8\u00d710 paper. No people, no story. The title is the only thing that tells us anything.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Stephen Shore\u2019s Church and 2nd Streets, Easton, Pennsylvania, June 20, 1974<\/a> is the colour one, flat and even, the date in the title like an entry in a surveyor\u2019s log.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And the Bechers\u2019 Pitheads, 1974<\/a> is a grid of anonymous mine heads, each one a specimen, closer to a herbarium than a gallery wall.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The reception was lukewarm and divided. Frank Gohlke recalled to the LA Times<\/a>: \u201cWhat I remember most clearly was that nobody liked it… I think it wouldn\u2019t be too strong to say that it was a vigorously hated show\u201d. Bess Abel, a photography student of Joe Deal\u2019s, recorded visitors on 13 and 14 December 1975, and the tapes, which survive in the Joe Deal Archive at the Center for Creative Photography, read like a focus group for a product that puzzled everyone. One visitor said: \u201cI don\u2019t like them, they\u2019re dull and flat. There\u2019s no people, no involvement, nothing\u201d. Another: \u201cAt first it\u2019s stark nothing, but then you look at it, and it\u2019s just about the way things are\u201d. A third said they didn\u2019t like to think there were ugly streets in America, but that when it\u2019s shown to you without beautification, maybe it tells you how much more we need here. The Guardian<\/a> tells a version of the same story with a truck in it: a visitor at the original show found his own truck in one of Adams\u2019s photographs. \u201cAt first they\u2019re really stark nothing, but then you really look at them and it\u2019s just the way things are. This is interesting, it really is\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One 1975 review stood out, at least in retrospect: Robert Woolard in Artweek called the show \u201cvery important\u201d and its ideas \u201cvital and fundamental\u201d. The photographers themselves were more cautious. Several were uneasy with the \u201cNew Topographics\u201d label, and some critics contested the \u201cneutral\u201d description, reading implicit social and political meaning into pictures that claimed to have none. That argument, deadpan record versus environmental indictment, was already around.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The reputation built slowly, through the 1980s and 1990s. By 1990 Andy Grundberg was reviewing a landscape exhibition in the New York Times and treating New Topographics as an established point of reference. The Eastman House\u2019s own press release<\/a> for the 2009 restaging calls it \u201cthe second most-cited photography exhibition in the history of the medium\u201d. Britt Salvesen, who co-organised that restaging, put the claim thus: \u201cArguably the last traditionally photographic style, New Topographics was also the first photoconceptual style\u201d. The show, she wrote, occurred \u201cjust as photography ceased to be an isolated, self-defined practice and took its place within the contemporary art world\u201d. From 1976 the Bechers taught at the Kunstakademie D\u00fcsseldorf, and their students, Andreas Gursky, Candida H\u00f6fer, Thomas Ruff and Thomas Struth, became the D\u00fcsseldorf School<\/a>, the detached, deadpan aesthetic that Charlotte Cotton identified as the most prominent photographic style since the 1990s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The systems reading came with the reputation. Critics like Andy Grundberg, Deborah Bright and Greg Foster-Rice linked the work to Minimalism and to the conceptual and serial art of the 1960s and 70s: serial sequences over single images, plain arrangement, each picture a representative of a larger system. Adams\u2019s The New West<\/em>, first published in 1974 by Colorado Associated University Press with a foreword by John Szarkowski, works exactly that way, a serial progression across the Colorado Front Range in which no single photograph dominates. Gohlke\u2019s frame is deliberately passive. And Jenkins hung the show in identical frames with grids, four Adams prints grouped like a Becher grid. Foster-Rice would later co-edit the essay collection Reframing the New Topographics<\/em> (2010).<\/p>\n\n\n\n There was something structural underneath it all too. Most of these photographers had studied in university programmes, and many of them taught, a break from the craft-trained generations before them. Ansel Adams had set up the first university photography department at the California School of Fine Arts in 1946, passing it to Minor White, and by the 1970s the academy was producing photographers who thought in series. The 1975 catalogue cost $6.95. By 2009 the same catalogue sold at rare-book sales for upwards of $1,000. And in 2009 the show itself went back on the road: the Center for Creative Photography and the George Eastman House<\/a> co-organised a tour of more than 100 works from the original show, from Rochester to LACMA to Tucson to SFMOMA<\/a> and on to Linz, Cologne, Paris, Rotterdam and Bilbao, with a Steidl catalogue and essays by Salvesen and Nordstr\u00f6m. LACMA\u2019s presentation<\/a> added context artists: O\u2019Sullivan, Evans and Ruscha, Robert Smithson\u2019s Instamatic snapshots, Dan Graham\u2019s Homes for America<\/em>, and the ode to the \u201cugly and ordinary\u201d that is Learning from Las Vegas<\/em>. There had been an earlier, reduced restaging as well, at the Arnolfini in Bristol in 1981, under the auspices of Paul Graham and Jem Southam. 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