Over 40 years ago, the ground-breaking exhibition New Topographics took as its subject matter the unalterably man-made landscapes of America, the roads and buildings of a nation in thrall to it own iconic potential. This one-day conference presents a series of papers that reconsider whether the American landscape can still be reinvented photographically, or whether we have exhausted a genre now so familiar it provides a predominantly comforting rather than critical look on what constitutes the United States? From recent work by Joel Sternfeld on American utopias, Sally Mann’s Southern visions, to the vanishing streets of Walker Evans, the documentary impetus behind landscape photography was never politically or, indeed, aesthetically straightforward. We hope that this one-day event will bring out new ideas about photography’s continuous intervention into as well as invention of America.
AMERICAN TOPOGRAPHICS 