New New Topographics
New New Topographics refers to a movement within landscape photography. First there were the pristine nature photographs such as those taken by Ansel Adams, then in the 1970’s a young group of photographers began taking images that were coined “New Topographics†which rejected the notion of unaltered landscapes by including the markings of humanity such as housing projects, bridges, and roads.
As an artist exploring the Internet and its impact on culture and human interactions, I wanted to create the next stage in the tradition of “topographics†or landscape photography. What does the landscape of the Internet look like? To explore this idea of space and location, I take “snapshots†of websites on-line and reduced the information until only blurred colors remain. Scale is thrown off and these websites now appear as aerial topography, colored blobs that we can imagine as lakes, deserts, or fields. The sites that I have chosen to photograph exist entirely on-line but we feel as if we are visiting a familiar physical location when we view sites such as Hotmail, Yahoo, and Amazon. This project is more than a reaction to traditions of landscape photography, it is questioning what photography is at this time, what landscapes mean in a world where virtuality is so prevalent.
