Abstract

‘New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-altered Landscape’ opened at George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, in October 1975. Crystallising recent developments in landscape photography, the group show would in time take on near-mythic proportions, enough to become the focus of various curatorial and scholarly re-framings. In the process, critics have tended to dismiss curator, William Jenkins, for rooting the exhibition’s documentary enquiry in the concept of style. As one commentator put it, doing so was to buy into the modernist premise that one merely ‘makes pictures to see forms in flat arrangements with their own internal coherence’. This article will however argue that none have yet seriously considered the implications of Jenkins’s claims. For rather than dispensing with subject, attending to style meant pointing to the rhetorical function of the photographs, and there locating a documentary mode. Owing to how Shore had now changed his 35mm Rollei for an 8-by-10-inch view camera, form was beginning to assume new conceptual significance in his work. I will suggest that Shore’s photographs emblematised Jenkins’s documentary proposal, marshalling style to metonymize landscape’s construction in their own structural schemata.