Week 11: Systems

In the essay "Systems Everywhere" the work of the New Topographics photographers is examined according to the systems theory, which puts the importance or meaning of something on the relation of multiple parts as opposed to each individual part holding its own. The first two systems we are presented with are the natural ecological system and the "broken system" of the human-altered landscape. The natural ecological system is structured around a recycling process: plants that intake oxygen and generate carbon-dioxide help feed the plants which intake carbon-dioxide and generate oxygen. We are presented with Robert Smithson's view of the "broken system" of the human altered landscape, which is addressing that man has not followed the natural system and is creating without regarding what will happen to the waste. This broken system is significantly enhanced by the industrial age and consumerism of a capitalist nation. The first example we see in the New Topographics, holding these ideas of systems in regard, is Robert Adams' Mobile Homes, Jefferson County, Colorado, 1973. The New Topographics photographers are looking at the systems of a human-altered landscape.

We then move onto the aesthetic of the images. In comparison with more traditional landscape photographers such as Ansel Adams, the New Topographics systematic aesthetic does not direct attention to each individual photograph but to the work as a whole. At first, one could regard this approach similar to Michael Fried's ideas about theatricality, but because unlike Ansel Adams' highly pictorial images of places most people were not familiar with at the time, the New Topographics look at what the mass majority was familiar with. Because of this we could relate the systematic aesthetic approach of the New Topographics photographs back to Hegel and his theories of true infinite.

I have made this graph that I think may be a visual representations of one of the systems involved in this work. As we can see, the photos are made using the landscape, the photos are presented to the viewer, who lives in the human altered landscape. I think that this can be related to Hegel's true infinite in that the viewers are connected in infinite ways to each other and the environment. These connections can be observed through the systematic aesthetics of the New Topographics.