Machines At Rest. Colorado Front Range, 2016
Black & White Magazine, April 2019 (#132)
I have been waiting for this since last year, and now it is finally on the newstands!
So…
Go to your local well-endowed book and magazine store and check out the latest issue of B&W Magazine!
Inside the April 2019 issue you’ll come across four pages of my photographs along with a nicely done critique/explanation/analysis by Larry Lytle (a fine artist, writer, and lecturer of art at California State University Channel Islands). The portfolio they chose to highlight is one I had initially named “New-New Topographics”, eventually settling on the more Matrix-sounding “Neo-Topographics”.
[NOTE: This is the second time I have made it into B&W Magazine. For more about the first portfolio they selected, see my March 31, 2017 blog entry, Black and White Magazine Spotlight Portfolio.]
Topographics… Neo-Topographics… ???
The popularization of this term–“topographics”–in photography dates principally from the influencial 1970s photo exhibition called “New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape“. The show included work from ten photographers (Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Frank Gohlke, Nicholas Nixon, Joe Deal, John Schott, Henry Wessel, Jr., and Stephen Shore) and ran from October 1975 through February 1976 (just as I was ordering my cap and gown for graduating high school!). The venue was the George Eastman House (as in Kodak) in Rochester, New York.
The basic idea behind this influencial 1970s exhibition–as well as the driving force behind the “Neo-Topo” images I have made–was to document how humans have changed and are continuing to change our landscape, for better or worse.
For further explanation of the thinking behind this kind of documentary photography, you can read the essay by Larry Lytle that accompanies my images as well as another excellent essay (also by Professor Lytle) titled, The New Topographics, or Paradise Repaved.
[NOTE: The word origin for you etymology-impaired, or the merely etymologically-curious… “topographics” comes from “topos”, meaning “place”, and “graphia”, meaning to “write or describe”. So, with “topography” you are describing, or portraying in some way, a place or landscape. You remember the old USGS topographic maps back before the days of GPS? That’s one example.]
The Images
Here are the photographs (of the 12 I submitted) that were included in the April, 2019 B&W Magazine spread. Some ingredients that I attempted to include in many of my Neo-Topo images include: a raw main subject–meaning, the current development operation, Nature as it was in the distance, an American flag, storm clouds, the machines that do the work, and only the implied presence of humans:
Wyndham Hill Development, #11. Frederick, Colorado, 2015
Silver Birch Fracking Site, #4. Frederick, Colorado, 2016
Moving Heaven and Earth. Longmont, Colorado, 2016
New Gas Line, 95th and Lookout, #2. Colorado, 2016
Progress, American Style, #1. Weld County, Colorado, 2015
Our National Anthem. Anthem, Colorado, 2015
And Now Some Related Tunes
It just happens that there are songs that reflect some of what I and other photographers have been trying to capture with our topographic images. (Indeed, Professor Lytle quoted lines from this first tune in the essay I linked above.)
Here, I’ll offer up two examples.
Maybe you have heard this one…?
“Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes made of ticky tacky
Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes all the same.
There’s a green one and a pink one
And a blue one and a yellow one,
And they’re all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.”
This is the original version as recorded by Malvina Reynolds in 1962 or 1963. Gotta love her voice:
Then I came across this more modern version (2012) of the same song by a band I had never heard of. Sometimes a remake just doesn’t do the original justice, but in this case I think it succeeds wonderfully. The video is superb:
And, finally, here is a third version of Little Boxes by Tommy Sands and his Irish Band as performed in 2009 at Madison Square Gardens for the Pete Seeger 90th Birthday Celebration. Again, a remake that is extremely well done::
Wait! I just found a fourth version that has an accompanying video that just nails it (sorta like Pink’s Another Brick in the Wall). This take on Little Boxes is by Elvis Costello and was done for the intro to the first episodes of the television series Weeds (2005-2012):
To cap it off, and to put this post to bed, I’ll send you away with a Joni Mitchell song that nearly anyone over the age of about 60 will likely recognize. This short snippet of the lyrics may bring life to some of your older brain cells–and they fit right in with what I have been doing with my photographs of the growing sprawl on the eastern plains along the Colorado Front Range:
“They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot
With a pink hotel, a boutique
And a swinging hot spot
Don’t it always seem to go
That you don’t know what you’ve got
‘Till it’s gone
They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot.”
UPDATE: I just received a copy of the April issue of B&W Magazine. Here is the spread–pretty nice! And again, a big thanks to Larry Lytle for the write-up…
B&W Magazine, #1, Portfolio Spotlight, April, 2019
B&W Magazine, #2, Portfolio Spotlight, April, 2019
B&W Magazine, #3, Portfolio Spotlight, April, 2019
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