New Color Photography vs New Topographics
ニューカラー / ニュー・トポグラフィックス
Both sit in Photography Movements, so the question is not what they belong to but how they behave. Both are read here as style. They are reached for with some of the same intent, which is where they get confused.
New Color Photography
The art photography of the everyday in color, legitimized by Eggleston's MoMA show. Dye-transfer density gave banal scenes gravity and overturned the rule that color was vulgar.
New Topographics
Turns from grand natural scenery to the landscapes people have altered, recording suburbs, graded building sites and industrial zones without heat.
| New Color Photography | New Topographics | |
|---|---|---|
| Era | 1976– | 1975– |
| Family | Photography Movements | Photography Movements |
| Kind | Style | Style |
| Cues | Nameless everyday scenes / Dye-transfer saturation / Casual oblique composition / The intensity of red | Empty suburbs / Frontality / Dry color / Man-altered landscape |
| Best used for | Advertising that shows ordinary goods and storefronts through color rather than staging · Photobooks on suburbs and small cities where the banal is the subject | Recording how a city edge or a graded site changes, year after year, under identical conditions. · Reports and exhibitions that present development as it is, without staging. |
| Type | Captions carry only place and year, never explanation | Captions carry place and date only, in one fixed form, with no comment. |
| Composition | Tilt off horizontal and push the subject toward an edge | Hold the horizon near the middle and shoot subjects square on at equal distance. |
| Material | Let one red run dense while the rest stays faded | Even overcast light, deep focus, processing that never lifts saturation. |
| Caution | Raising saturation gets mistaken for the style, so the choice of subject goes unexamined and the pictures end up loud but with no reason to look. | Posing as neutral while choosing light and framing too carefully produces scenic photography in documentary clothes, and the change goes unread. |