--- description: A new exhibition explores the fascinating evolution from the sublime, high-contrast style of Ansel Adams' photography to the cool, detached documentary look favored in the 1970s and 1980s. title: California’s Changing Landscape image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt30f33d5fa10709b7/69868572e8524b65ad601d10/steinmetz_phel_sunday1281-1-1-w.jpg?branch=production&width=3840&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  * [World](/section/world/) ## World Update your preferences in [Account Settings](/account/preferences/) Close * [LightBox](/tag/time-section-lightbox/) ## LightBox Update your preferences in [Account Settings](/account/preferences/) Close # California's Changing Landscape by [Lyra Kilston](/author/lyra-kilston/) ## Lyra Kilston Update your preferences in [Account Settings](/account/preferences/) Close Oct 12, 2011 8:00 AM CUT  Sunday, Palms to Pines Hwy, California, 1981 Sunday, Palms to Pines Hwy, California, 1981© Phel Steinmetz by [Lyra Kilston](/author/lyra-kilston/) ## Lyra Kilston Update your preferences in [Account Settings](/account/preferences/) Close Oct 12, 2011 8:00 AM CUT _October marks the launch of Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A., 1945-1980, a region-wide collaboration celebrating the birth of the Los Angeles art scene. Lyra Kilston reports on the landscape photography made in this prolific era, the second in a three-part LightBox series about PST._ Joe Deal, reflecting on his landscape photographs of the early 1970s, wrote: “Why contribute, I reasoned, to the growing pile of photographs of an idealized American landscape while it was being chewed up before our eyes by advancing suburban development, interstate highways and shopping malls?” Deal’s sentiments were shared by a new school of Southern California-based photographers, including Lewis Baltz, Henry Wessel and Robert Adams, who felt that landscape photography was languishing in a dreamy, nostalgic style which ignored the reality of a changing world. They sought, as Deal put it, an “unromantic and unfiltered way of looking through the lens.” This different style of photography—now known as New Topographics after the title of a groundbreaking and highly influential 1975 exhibition at the International Museum of Photography in Rochester, N.Y.—departed from the legacy of idealized landscape photography mastered by Ansel Adams and Edward Weston by unflinchingly depicting the Western landscape as it had become: full of highways, housing developments and anonymous corporate buildings. The fascinating evolution from the sublime, high-contrast style of Adams and Weston to the cool, detached documentary look favored in the 1970s and 1980s is explored in the exhibit _Seismic Shift: Lewis Baltz, Joe Deal and California Landscape Photography, 1944-1984_, which features work by more than 40 photographers, now on view at the California Museum of Photography at the University of California, Riverside (where Deal and Baltz both taught). The early photographs in this exhibit showcase the majesty of unspoiled natural settings, but by the 1950s the influence of abstract art was apparent in formal compositions by Minor White and William Garnett. By the late 1960s many landscape photographers were heavily manipulating their images to convey psychological states and mystic symbolism. As one critic deemed it, this method eventually reached a point of “poetic exhaustion.” In response, the New Topographic photographers portrayed the intersection of nature and civilization with a flat sobriety. Common subjects included abandoned storefronts, storage facilities and chain link fences, as well as examples of artificial nature, such as a mural of a farm painted on the side of a truck. In Wessel’s deadpan _California_ (1969) a Chevron oil sign hovers over a blank desert of scrub brush, and in _Los Angeles_ (1970), an electrical pole bisects an empty parking lot. Judy Fiskin, Laurie Brown and Leland Rice focused on the impact of tract housing and construction sites, while Grant Rusk shot hills sliced with paths of asphalt and concrete. A sense of loss is inevitable when all that’s left of nature is a strip of dirt fringing a concrete wall, as portrayed in one of Baltz’s well-known images. Yet as Robert Adams noted, “Unspoiled places sadden us because, in a sense, they are no longer true.” As stark or banal as the New Topographic style was, there is a value and beauty in its truthfulness. Landscape had changed dramatically in the developed West, and photography had to change with it. [_Seismic Shift_: Lewis Baltz, Joe Deal and California Landscape Photography, 1944-1984](http://www.artsblock.ucr.edu/events/index.php?content=event-entry&event-ID=1.2011.0002.0001 "undefined")_, is on view through Dec. 31 at the California Museum of Photography at the University of California, Riverside._ _Lyra Kilston is a writer and editor based in Los Angeles. Her work has appeared in numerous publications, including_ Artforum_,_ Art in America _and_ Photo District News_._ Read the first part of the PST series [here](http://lightbox.time.com/2011/09/29/julius-shulman-photographys-master-of-mid-century-modern/#1 "undefined").  Tar Covered Vat and Condominiums, Long Beach, California, 1980 ©Leland Rice  Sewage Tank, Santa Paula, California, 1953 ©Estate of William A. Garnett. Courtesy of the J. Paul Getty Museum  45\. West Wall, Unoccupied Industrial Structure, 20 Airway Drive, Costa Mesa, 1974, from New Industrial Parks near Irvine, California © Lewis Baltz. Courtesy of Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, California/ Gallery Luisotti  Untitled, 1978 from West Coast Now portfolio © John Divola.  26\. West Wall, R-ohm Corporation, 16931 Millikan, Irvine, 1974, from New Industrial Parks near Irvine, California © Lewis Baltz. Courtesy of Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, California/ Gallery Luisotti  Glendale, California, 1979 © The Estate of Joe Deal. Courtesy Robert Mann Gallery  Colton, California, 1978, from The Fault Zone portfolio © The Estate of Joe Deal. Image courtesy Robert Mann Gallery  After a Flash Flood, Rancho Mirage, California, July 1979 © Joel Sternfeld. Courtesy the Los Angeles County Museum of Art/ Luhring Augustine Gallery  Mono Lake, 1977, composite gelatin silver print Edmund Teske. Courtesy of the Oakland Museum of California © Edmund Teske Archives/Laurence Bump and Nils Vidstrand  Untitled, 1975 © The Brett Weston Archive.Courtesy of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.  Atomic Crater, Nevada, 1962 Anonymous photographer. Courtesy of David Knaus.  Ontario, California, 1980 © Robert Adams. Fraenkel Gallery and Matthew Marks Gallery  San Mateo County, California, 1947 Minor White. Courtesy of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art/ Minor White Archive, Princeton University Art Museum. © Trustees of Princeton University.  California, 1969 Henry Wessel. Courtesy of Pace/MacGill Gallery, NY  Los Angeles, 1970 Henry Wessel. Courtesy of Pace/MacGill Gallery, NY.  Backyard, Diamond Bar, California, 1980 © The Estate of Joe Deal. Courtesy of David Knaus/ Robert Mann Gallery,  Sunday, Palms to Pines Hwy, California, 1981 © Phel Steinmetz ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/3781694/californias-changing-landscape/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/3781694/californias-changing-landscape/"},"headline":"California's Changing Landscape","datePublished":"2011-10-12T08:00:39.000Z","dateModified":"2026-05-11T04:41:21.434Z","description":"A new exhibition explores the fascinating evolution from the sublime, high-contrast style of Ansel Adams' photography to the cool, detached documentary look favored in the 1970s and 1980s.","url":"https://time.com/3781694/californias-changing-landscape/","keywords":["LightBox","Out There"],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt30f33d5fa10709b7/69868572e8524b65ad601d10/steinmetz_phel_sunday1281-1-1-w.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Lyra Kilston","jobTitle":null,"url":"https://time.com/author/lyra-kilston/"}],"articleSection":"World","image":[{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt30f33d5fa10709b7/69868572e8524b65ad601d10/steinmetz_phel_sunday1281-1-1-w.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","width":1200,"height":675,"headline":"steinmetz_phel_Sunday1281-1-1-w","caption":"Sunday, Palms to Pines Hwy, California, 1981","creditText":"© Phel Steinmetz","representativeOfPage":true}],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/section/world/","name":"World"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"/tag/time-section-lightbox/","name":"LightBox"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/3781694/californias-changing-landscape/","name":"California's Changing Landscape"}}]}] ```