NUOVO PAESAGGIO AMERICANO
DIALECTICAL LANDSCAPES
Paolo Costantini, Silvio Fuso, Sandro Mescola [Curators]
Paolo Costantini, Silvio Fuso, Sandro Mescola [Curators]: NUOVO PAESAGGIO AMERICANO. DIALECTICAL LANDSCAPES [Fotografie di Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, William Eggleston, John Gossage, Stephen Shore]. Milano: Edizioni Electa SPA, 1987. First edition. Quarto. Text in Italian. Photographically printed thick wrappers. 108 pp. 75 color and black and white plates. Mild yellowing to spine. Corners starting to lightly curl. A very good to near fine copy. Rare.
9.75 x 11 softcover book with 108 pages profusely illustrated with 75 color and black and white plates. Catalog of an exhibition held at the Palazzo Fortuny, Venice, April 11-July 19, 1987. A scarce Italian catalogue on five topographic American photographers whose work rose to the fore of contemporary photography beginning in the seventies.
Each of the photographers is represented by fifteen images -- the work of Adams, Baltz and Gossage is in black-and-white, while the Eggleston and Shore images are in color. Some of the landscapes are of nature while others interpret man-made interiors, exteriors, or scenes.
A quotation from Robert Adams explains the unifying concept: "The form the photographer records, though discovered in a split second of literal fact, is different because it implies an order beyond itself, a landscape into which all fragments, no matter how imperfect, fit perfectly."
The groundbreaking and highly influential 1975 exhibition curated by William Jenkins, at the International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House "New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-altered Landscape" organized the work of ten photographers [Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Joe Deal, Frank Gohlke, Nicholas Nixon, John Schott, Stephen Shore, and Henry Wessel, Jr.] who photographed the landscape in a non-traditional way.
While Ansel Adams and his followers photographed dramatic and astounding beauty in the landscape, the New Topographics photographers emphasized the tension between the land's traditional beauty and the results of our presence within it. "Pictures should look like they were easily taken," said Robert Adams around the time of this show. "Otherwise beauty in the world is made to seem elusive and rare, which it is not." Adams' own The New West and Lewis Baltz's New Industrial Parks preceded this important exhibition. However, it was the exhibition itself that conceptualized and made public the work by these photographers as a major movement in photography.
"In 1975, the year he published his first book , 'The new Industrial Parks near Irvine, California,' Lewis Baltz was also included in a landmark exhibition at the International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House called 'New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape.' Although some of the participants in that show managed to elude the label, Baltz - -along with Robert Adams, Stephen Shore, Henry Wessel, Jr., and Bernd and Hilla Becher -- was effectively branded, and 'The New Industrial Parks' was paired with Adams' 1974 'The New West' as the most cogent, concise, and rigorous New Topographics documents produced in America. The label stuck primarily because it was invented to describe exactly what California-born Baltz had been doing since the late '60s: photograph the American landscape as a dead zone. Tamed, flattened and sectioned off into building sites and real-estate opportunities, Baltz's New West--most of it located in California's vast suburban sprawl -- had long since lost any memory of magnificence and promise. In their place was the alluring vacuum of anonymity (though that seems beside the point in pictures devoid of any human presence) and desolation so complete it was almost elegant. Baltz had honed in on that austere, unlikely beauty in his earlier series on tract homes, but he refined his vision for the Irvine series, which focuses on the faades of windowless office blocks and electronics factories, some still in construction on barren lots, others landscaped as perfunctorily as a toll plaza.... [Unlike] Ed Ruscha's genuinely artless images of apartment buildings and parking lots, Baltz's pictures are pointedly artful. The Irvine series, though (presumably) despairing of the industrial parks' cold emptiness, can't help but establish its link to minimalist painting and sculpture, particularly Donald Judd's boxes and Carl Andre's concrete blocks."-- Vince Aletti [in Roth].