One of the biggest challenges facing any visual artist and photographer is that everything has already been done before and we need to find ways to make our work unique and stand out from within the millions of images that we are bombarded with each and every day. Exploring strategies of looking refers to the returning to or revisiting moments and their place in time. This is a valuable method and approach to photography as looking at previously made images and ideas is a way to learn from them and to incorporate these strategies into my own approach and methods.

My practice has always been rooted in the urban landscape with a focus on architecture, non-spaces, structures of power, identity of places, and cycles of decay.  My interest in the urban landscape arose from the New Topographics movement and photographers such as Edward Ruscha, Lewis Baltz and Joel Steinfeld. Their images of man-made urban structures and photographic stills capture the details within the emptiness of the urban environment while simultaneously implying a human presence. 

This is something I’ve incorporated into my own work and I’ve begun to look at the urban landscape very differently, capturing small details that are only revealed upon closer inspection of the image. These subtle clues provide a sense of the environment, the way people interact with these places and how I am responding to the spaces as a photographer.  The influence of the New Topographics Movement is very evident as I convey a sense of loneliness and isolation within my images, the absence of others being countered by the small details that remind of the human presence.

This is a popular methodology and many landscape photographers have drawn upon the work of the New Topographics, focusing on finding beauty in the banale and building on the foundation created by this movement. Those artists who locate their practice in contemporary expressions of the New Topographics tend to combine the influences of a number of artists associated with this movement and style, coming up with a unique synergy of their own. This is indeed what I attempt to achieve in my own practice.

References:

• TIME. 2015. Discover The New Topography Of Landscape Photography. 2015 [online] Available at: <https://time.com/3971441/landscape-photography-new-topographics/&gt; [Accessed 12 October 2020].
• The Guardian. 2020. New Topographics: Photographs That Find Beauty In The Banal. [online] Available at: <https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2010/feb/08/new-topographics-photographs-american-landscapes&gt; [Accessed 12 October 2020].