"Is it possible to deny style, to make a photograph without style?... To recognise one's antecedents... and choose to make images that look a certain way is a stylistic decision, even if the aim is to reduce the intrusion of style into the image."
William Jenkins, 1975
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I must confess a deep attraction to the everyday American landscape of suburbs and roadsides. From the moment I examined the work of the artists in the 1975 New Topographics exhibition in New York, principally Stephen Shore, Robert Adams and Lewis Baltz, I knew this would become a delightful personal pursuit. My choice of the word "attraction" matters because, as Walker Evans noted in the 1970s, sometimes there is no deeper justification for our actions and obsessions: we photograph what stands before us and attracts us, just as Mallory attempted to climb Mount Everest simply because it was there. Like Evans, I also have a hungry eye, or at least I try to feed it: I enjoy looking and observing, finding this directly, intellectually and aesthetically satisfying.
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What is truly striking is that this American vernacular landscape is still there, here. When I first visited the United States in the late 1980s, I was struck by the leap into another world, the picturesque world that films had built in my mind's eye. Today, 25 years later, it is utterly familiar, chiefly because globalisation has exported the same landscape of American consumption and territorial transformation: roads, shopping centres, suburbs, commercial main streets, motels, non-places and so on. I like this common ground, however ordinary, ugly or boring it may be. Indeed, this paradoxical balance between progress and degradation, boredom and relevance, rejection and attraction lies at the heart of what New—or Old—Topographics is about.
Why "Old" Topographics? It is, in a sense, a naïve play on words. Yet the repertoire these artists understood as new in their time is now both old—in some cases abandoned—and contemporary. It is old, but the spirit of novelty those settings held for the photographers remains part of the very essence of America's early-twenty-first-century built environment. The spaces Stephen Shore considered "uncommon" are now entirely common, even picturesque, consumed both by an unwitting public, proud to see expressions of national identity in them, and by sections of the art world. New Topographics has become a style or label, and I am not ashamed to recognise myself in that way of looking.
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Whereas in 1975 the exhibition surveyed its own here and now, I wonder whether today the content of this double series, "Old Topographics", with photographs taken in the American Southwest, is truly the fullest, most sincere and neutral expression of a particular cartographic reality. There is nothing strange in representing and mapping these colloquial architectures, billboards, roads, streets or scrap: this is the ordinary, and I choose to reassess this visual literacy with conviction, detachment and a certain ironic aestheticisation. Like Venturi and Scott Brown in Las Vegas, I still believe there are many interesting findings and ideas to draw from them.
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Iñaki Bergera. Written at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Arizona. July 2012.
