A wave of exhibitions across Europe and the U.S. showcases photographers with Russian roots which explore landscapes using more conceptual approaches. Influenced by historical movements like New Topographics and the Düsseldorf School, these artists redefine our perception of human-altered environments through detached yet deeply evocative imagery.

There is a spectrum of exhibitions currently on show throughout Europe and the USA by Russian-born photographers, or artists using the medium of photography in their work. They are roughly from the same generation in their forties and may loosely be described as ‘working with landscape’. An intrinsic quality of the human mind is that it tries to connect sets of dots into constellations in order to make some sense. Like a map. Is there a common narrative running through their photographic approaches to landscape?

A pictorial landscape can convey numerous different meanings. Think of Ed Ruscha (b. 1937) with his Twenty-six Gasoline Stations (1963), mundane vistas made by humans, totally anathema to the human-oriented, lively and entertaining visuals of pop art that was all the fashion in those days. As the artist himself admitted, he was mostly influenced by Abstract Impressionism, and Russian art critic Irina Kulik writes in her book ‘Projected Driveways’, that Ruscha depicts a shining picture where reality has disappeared.

Another major influence upon later generations were Bernd (1931–2007) and Hilla (1934–2015) Becher with their deadpan portraits of industrial buildings, which they started to produce in the late 1950s. Their work was partly driven by a sense of ongoing loss. The industrial landscape even in the middle of the 20th century was already a monument to itself that needed to be documented and catalogued while it was possible, many of their subjects were demolished soon after. In the 21st century those water towers and elevators look hauntologically romantic.

These artists largely introduced photography into the plane of conceptual art and had a huge impact on photography itself.

In 1975, an important exhibition called ‘New Topographics: Photographs of Man-Altered Landscapes’ was held in Rochester, New York, showcasing works by the Becher duo along with those by eight young photographers including Lewis Baltz (1945-2014), Frank Gohlke (b. 1942) and Stephen Shore (b. 1947). This exhibition has been recreated multiple times in other places and is still considered a critical milestone today.

This attitude towards making visible the signs of human presence that formed a landscape was perceived as a political statement, and a capitalistic one at that by Allan Sekula (1951-2013) and other left-wing thinkers. They called it the ‘aesthetic of the neutron bomb’, that has eradicated workers and where only real estate remains. We may be reasonably sure that artists of the New Topographics school (as it is sometimes called, informal as it was), the deadpan visual poets, were thinking along different lines. Providing typologies, finding beauty and fragility in blank facades, they were picturing what was still visible, but looked as though it was disappearing in a variety of ways. It was largely the end of modernism as in the end of a dream–something that Sekula actually called for.

Bernd and Hilla Becher have extended their influence by becoming the originators of the Dusseldorf photography school. They both taught at the Academy of Arts in Dusseldorf, prominent students being Andreas Gursky (b. 1955), Thomas Struth (b. 1954), Axel Hütte (b. 1951) and Thomas Ruff (b. 1955), all of whom also worked a lot with landscapes, pushing the limits of the photographic medium.

In 2018, a loose group of photographers that may be styled as Russian deadpan put together an exhibition called New Landscape that first showed in the Yeltsin Center in Ekaterinburg, before being rostered at the Ekaterina Foundation in Moscow in 2019 as well as subsequently other venues. Curated by Anastasia Tsaider (b. 1983) and Petr Antonov (b. 1977), also photographers who participated in the exhibition, it consisted of work by Alexander Gronsky (b. 1980), Valery Nistratov (b. 1973), Sergey Novikov (b. 1979), Liza Faktor (b. 1975) and Max Sher (b. 1975). Over the course of the previous decade, most of them collaborated with agency and gallery Photographer.ru (later called the Grinberg Gallery), or took part in projects organized by Liza Faktor´s Objective Reality foundation, or they just appeared to be close aesthetically to one another. The exhibition provided a reference to the New Topographics but also served as a heroic effort of summarizing earlier projects, criticizing the observable situation through the medium of landscape.

Fast forward to today and the activities of many Russian photographers or artists working in this medium build from these foundations, like Tallinn-born, Moscow-based Alexander Gronsky who currently has a solo exhibition running in Toulouse, France. The municipal photography gallery Le Chateau D’eau, in collaboration with Polka Gallery, Paris (who has been representing Gronsky since 2010) is showing some of his earlier series´, including ´The Edge´ (2009) and ´Mountains and Waters´ (2013). Historically, The Edge was first exhibited in Moscow in the Grinberg Gallery at Winzavod, it is about the boundary between city and nature, a space which creates a lot of visual chaos, re-defining the notion of beauty by incorporating what we are accustomed to seeing into our visual culture. ´Mountains and Waters´ was shot in China, diptychs which depict the same time and space, cut by the frame into two opposite parts, as if a scroll of traditional Chinese landscape painting (hence the name) has been rolled in front of us.

Another intriguing show took place in Autumn last year in the Magasins Généraux, a cultural venue in a 1930s industrial building on the banks of the Ourcq Canal in Pantin on the outskirts of Paris. Curated by Anna Labouze and Keimis Henni, and called ´Grande Ville´, it included works by some twenty-four artists of different generations, with some well-established names like Francis Alÿs, Laure Prouvost and Rirkrit Tiravanija. A series of photographic prints ´Pastoral´ (2012) by Gronsky is dedicated to the attempts of city dwellers to drop through the grid and find a piece of nature in which to relax under the shade of high-rises, city parks and on the banks of sand quarries.

This ‘border feeling’ has also been studied by Alexander Gronsky in his meta-series ´Scheme´ (1st edition 2015-2016 initially together with Ksenia Babushkina) and an ongoing documentation of the city of Moscow offering a visual rift between the sophistication of a megapolis in characteristic grey, and the shiny bright propaganda of animated billboards. One of Gronsky’s major inspirations can be found in the works of Paul Graham (b. 1956), who has shifted the borders of visual storytelling many times over. Often playing with the poetics of landscape, Graham´s work always surprises, like in his 1987 ´Troubled Land´ about miniscule signs of political division embedded in the landscape of Northern Ireland, or in his latest series ´Verdigris / Ambergis´ currently on show in Berlin’s Carlier | Gebauer, that deals with the notion of vision itself, adding in references to Caspar David Friedrich for good measure.

Max Sher (b. 1975) is another strong voice in the New Landscape exhibition. Photographer, visual artist and critic living in Berlin since 2021, he is now launching a new book, called ´Snow´. Shot in Turkey it is a photographic reference to a book of the same name by famous Turkish writer Orkhan Pamuk (the book launch is accompanied by a pop-up exhibition at the AFF Galerie in Berlin, opening on 21st February).

One of Sher’s best-known projects is called Palimpsests (2014-15) later published as a book and the core of his 2021 solo exhibition ´Commentary on Landscape´ at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art. For this project, Sher travelled extensively throughout Russia, taking pictures of everyday urban structures like train stations, municipal offices, construction sites and residential buildings. The goal was to produce a set of very conventional images. To someone who is well travelled in Russia, it creates a feeling of discomfort or déjà vu. You want to shout out “I know where that is!” only to be corrected because it always turns out to be a different place, which looks just the same. The project speaks of how it is politics that defines our economic situation, and how the latter accounts for the views across one eighth of the Earth’s landmass.

Another important project by Sher, together with Sergei Novikov, is called ´Infrastructures´. Created over several years from 2016 to 2019 it is a huge body of research, published in 2019 in two volumes including photography, both staged and documentary with fifty essays. It is a study in the political significance of physical objects such as roads, bridges and pipelines.

Max Sher has very different sources of inspiration than Gronsky; when asked, he names Allan Sekula and David Goldblatt (1930-2018), two innovators in the medium who often turned to text as a means of expression which was for them no less important than the visuals; both were critics of the late capitalism and colonialism.

Across the Atlantic there is an important show currently on at the MET in New York that appears to be based upon a very different tradition yet still calls for comparison with the artistic explorations of the above artists. It is called ´Floridas´ by Anastasia Samoylova (b. 1984) and Walker Evans (1903-1975). Having moved to the USA many years ago, Samoylova also uses landscape photography as means of critique: a long-time resident of Florida, she sees through the deceptive images of a tropical paradise. An important issue for her is the ecology breakdown and the ruthlessness of people who carry on as if nothing has happened. An earlier book by Samoylova called ´FloodZone´ described Florida as an unrolling ecological disaster. Samoylova uses layers of images to construct pictures that are often not what they seem. She discovered Walker Evans’ fascination with Florida from the late 1930s and Samoylova began to locate the same places Evans had shot all those years ago and it ended up in the book the ´Floridas´, with photographs by both her and Evans.

Samoylova, Sher and Gronsky all work with landscape as a means to an end; they have an approach that manages to be critical, detached and caring at the same time. Yet the inspiration and influences behind their work are very different and their creative trajectories can be best seen as a convergent evolution. Over time, fish, sea-dwelling dinosaurs and whales all adopted similar appearances. And so it may also be with landscape photography by Russian-born artists in their early forties who are scattered around the world.