While pulling together the slideshow for tomorrow night, I was reminded of the American Suburb X website/blog. There is an excellent essay by Tod Papageorge on Robert Adams’ What We Bought: The New World. I don’t know why I hadn’t seen it earlier, but I first became aware of Adams’ work when I saw the show in 2000 at the Yale University Art Gallery, shortly after the acquisition that Papageorge talks about. This series presented an awakening of sorts for me and was an entry point to the ideas presented by the New Topographics show at the George Eastman House in 1975 (I obviously did not see that show.) The New Topographics rethought the American landscape and the way that photographers responded to it. Out went an aesthetic primacy, jettisoned for the conveyance of essential visual information. Also included in this show, curated by William Jenkins, were Lewis Baltz, Joe Deal, Frank Gohlke, Nicholas Nixon, John Schott, Stephen Shore, Henry Wessel, Jr. and Bernd and Hilla Becher.
I’ll leave the criticism to Papgeorge, noting only that Adams’ What We Bought was a large influence on the work I was making at the time and am continuing to make in the city in Maine where I grew up.
American Suburb X has been added to the blogroll at the right.