Steidl

The “dream shock” of Liu Zheng’s title refers to an awakening as if from a deep sleep. There is a moment between sleep and consciousness in which the dream state and conscious reality collide. It is a fertile, erotic and sometimes violent area of the mind, in which both exquisite and tortured imagery may surface. Liu Zheng is one of the few Chinese photographers whose work has reached the West. The exhibition of his extensive series The Chinese at ICP in New York in 2004 and the accompanying Steidl book indicated he was working on the borders between the documentary tradition and the extended portrait school of August Sander. His background on the Workers’ Daily suggests his grounding as a photojournalist. Yet Liu Zheng’s vision does not echo the common view of China, characterized by anonymity in the sheer mass of the population or by the momentum of industry. Frequently the subjects of his portraits are those on the fringes of Chinese society; his outsiders contribute to an unfamilia

Revisiting the exhibition that defined a generation of photography, through a meticulous reimagining of the original catalogIn his introduction to the exhibition catalog for New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape, held in 1975 at the George Eastman House International Museum of Photography in Rochester, NY, curator William Jenkins described the black-and-white images he selected as "reduced to an essentially topographic state, conveying substantial amounts of information but eschewing entirely the aspects of beauty, emotion and opinion." The exhibition brought together 10 photographers: Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Joe Deal, Frank Gohlke, Nicholas Nixon, John Schott, Stephen Shore and Henry Wessel Jr.Signaling the emergence of a new approach to landscape, the show effectively gave a name to a movement. Even today, the concept of "New Topographics" is used to characterize the work of artists not yet born when the exhibition was held. "New Topograp

In the late 1960s and early ’70s Lewis Baltz became fascinated by the stark, repellent, manmade landscape that was rolling over California’s then still agrarian terrain. Baltz made a number of projects on this subject, the best known of which, The new Industrial Parks near Irvine, California, was first published in 1974. With this book Baltz took his place near the center of the New Topographics movement, a newly coined term emblematic of a cool, distanced, yet critical view of the emerging man-altered landscape. The Topographic position, detached and glacial, has since influenced photographic practice in the United States, Germany and Japan. A lot of people liked albums, family snapshots, but I never did. I liked the photographs in Real Estate office windows, which are technically correct and heartbreakingly empty. Lewis Baltz