This past weekend I had the opportunity to see a fascinating photography exhibit at LACMA, New Topographics, the re-creation of a 1975 exhibit originally held at the International Museum of Photography, George Eastman House. Misunderstood and critically underappreciated at the time, it documents seemingly banal subjects such as tract homes in nondescript suburbs, commercial strips, parking lots, and other “everyday” objects of the postwar built environment. The work of these photographers is no less captivating today, even as the terrain it covers is more familiar to the viewing public.

Suburbs often lend themselves to various moralizing statements (about a spiritual void in American culture or about our unsustainable consumption of land and resources, for instance), but these photographs generally avoid value-laden judgments on the inhabitants of these arguably “ugly” buildings and aesthetically-minimalist landscapes. Nor do they read, more than thirty years later, as an anthropological time capsule, a window into shifting modes of architecture and living. Instead, intentionally or not, much of the work feels redemptive of the uniquely American visual vernacular that are today’s first-generation suburbs. Robert Adams, whose photographic series The New West receives prominent placement in the LACMA exhibit, would probably disagree strongly with my interpretation, as he makes his own contempt for suburbia well-known in the accompanying text to his book. But such is the nature of art–its visual meaning sometimes escapes the author’s control and becomes something quite opposite of the original intention.  The show is definitely worth seeing before it closes in January 2010.