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© Stefan Frank
The Photobook Show

New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape

episode 11

Tue, Oct 24, 2023 at 1pm (ET)
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Let’s look at an influential exhibition and how its trajectory helped shape photography from the 1970s through to today: “New Topographics: Pictures of Man-Altered Landscapes,” shown in 1975 in the George Eastman House’s International Museum of Photography in Rochester, New York. We’ll follow the course of the show’s lasting impact on aesthetic and conceptual approaches to landscape photography, as well as look at the careers of some of its protagonists and the art scene from which these images emerged. Photobooks we’ll explore include Lewis Baltz’s The Prototype Works, Bernd and Hilla Becher’s Basic Forms, and Henry Wessel‘s collection of three bodies of work titled Traffic/Sunset Park/Continental Divide. “New Topographics” was also a significant influence on Stefan’s own work, so he will close by showing some images from his newly published book Irgendwo (“Anywhere”), released just two weeks ago. 


Watch the recording of this episode


Stefan Frank

Stefan Frank is a photographer and writer, working from Heidelberg, Germany. Way before he came to photography, he studied mathematics and philosophy at Ruhr Universität Bochum and worked as an IT specialist. He studied at Atelier Smedsby with JH Engström and Margot Wallard in Paris in 2017, before he eventually began studying photography at Ostkreuzschule, Berlin, with Peter Bialobrzeski. He graduated in 2023 with the work Irgendwo (“Anywhere”), a project dealing with politically motivated crime and the terror-spree of the far right in Germany. He has been teaching with StrudelmediaLive since 2020, giving courses on surrealism, poetics of space, gestalt theory for photographers, and more. His work has been exhibited in Heidelberg, Frankfurt, and Berlin.

Stefan teaches the poetics of space, nighttime photography, and much more — including presenting The Photobook Show — for StrudelmediaLive.