Nicholas Nixon, born in 1947, is known for the ease and intimacy of his black and white large format photography.  As well as being one of the photographers exhibiting in New Topographics, Nicholas Nixon’s subjects include schoolchildren and schools in and around Boston, people living along the Charles River near Boston and Cambridge as well as cities in the South, his family and himself, people in nursing homes, the blind, sick and dying people, and the intimacy of couples. Nixon is also well known for his work People With AIDS, begun in 1987.

Recording his subjects close and with meticulous detail facilitates the connection between the viewer and the subject. Influenced by the photographs of Edward Weston and Walker Evans, Nixon began working with large-format cameras. Whereas most professional photographers had abandoned these cameras in favor of shooting on 35mm film with more portable cameras, Nixon preferred the format because it allowed prints to be made directly from the 8×10 inch negatives, retaining the clarity and integrity of the image. Nixon has said “When photography went to the small camera and quick takes, it showed thinner and thinner slices of time, [unlike] early photography where time seemed non-changing. I like greater chunks, myself. Between 30 seconds and a thousandth of a second the difference is very large.”

Interview with Nixon from Ahorn Magazine

Urbonautica article

Nixon’s work is included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, among many others.

New Topographics and urban landscape

Nixon’s early city views taken of Boston and New York in the mid-seventies were exhibited at the New Topographics exhibition in 1975. See Google Images from the Exhibition

His images are mostly high view images showing complexity of roadways and textured skyscrapers. Although they have a formal beauty, I do not find them as effective in terms of message or emotion as other images in the exhibition.

Joseph Maurice “Joe” Deal (August 12, 1947 – June 18, 2010) was an American photographer who specialized in depicting how the landscape was transformed by people.

Google images

Square format landscapes on the Great Plains.

Biography

Wikipedia

Deal was born in Topeka, Kansas on August 12, 1947, and was raised in Albany, Missouri and St. Paul, Minnesota. He attended the Kansas City Art Institute, where he earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. After his graduation in 1970, he was designated as a conscientious objector by the local draft board and was assigned to work as a guard and janitor at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, and its museum of photography. He later earned a master’s degree in photography and a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of New Mexico.

While working on his thesis for his MFA degree in the 1970s Deal started teaching at the University of California, Riverside, where he helped establish the UCR/California Museum of Photography. In 1989, he became dean of theSchool of Art at Washington University in St. Louis. He was named to serve as provost of the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, Rhode Island 1999, and lived there for the remainder of his life.

In the mid-1970s, Deal was one of nine photographers chosen to participate in the “New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape” exhibition curated by William Jenkins at the Eastman House’s International Museum of Photography. Deal contributed 18 black and white photographs to the exhibit in a 32 cm × 32 cm format. Many of the photographs Deal submitted featured homes newly constructed against the desolate landscape of the American Southwest.

He continued photographing man’s effect on the landscape in “The Fault Zone”, which featured images combining human and geologic effects on the area surrounding the San Andreas Fault. “Subdividing the Inland Basin” featured suburban areas east of Los Angeles and “Beach Cities” focused on Pacific Ocean communities in Southern California.

 “West and West: Reimagining the Great Plains” featured photographs of the grid pattern of much of the Midwestern United States and was on exhibit at the University of Arizona’s Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Arizona after opening at the Rhode Island School of Design and being presented at New York City’s Robert Mann Gallery.^[3]

A ten-year resident of Providence, Rhode Island, Deal died at a hospice there due to bladder cancer at age 62 on June 18, 2010.He is survived by his wife, Betsy Sara Ruppa, and a daughter, Meredith Deal.

Google images

Frank Gohlke’s website

http://terrain.org/2011/interviews/interview-with-frank-gohlke/

Measure of Emptiness: Grain Elevators in the American Landscape

‘ I was frustrated by the discrepancy between the facts surrounding the grain elevators and the intensity of my emotional responses to the objects themselves…To me, the photographs I was making argued that there are deeper impulses lurking somewhere in the functional surfaces and details of the grain elevators, and that subjective choice as well as objective necessity has a role in determining their form.’

‘ The dignity of grain elevators, the precision, intelligence and grace of their formal language, their majestic presence within the landscape all seem to confirm the faith that, given the right circumstances, we will make visible the best that is within us.’