New cartographics: Photography and the artistic mapping of the American West, 1969‐79

Abstract

This article examines the work of a diverse group of photographers who in the late 1960s and 1970s employed mapping techniques and devices as a means of artistic creation. Products of photography’s unprecedented growth, photographers John Pfahl, Michael Bishop, Kenneth Josephson and the participants of the Rephotographic Survey Project employed cartographic and topographic strategies as part of their exploration of the history of their medium and the American West. These artist-photographers, moreover, responded to the nineteenth-century surveys of the West as well as its relation to other, better-known contemporary movements like ‘New Topographics’. In all, this article provides the first exploration of this distinctive group of American photographers which may be collectively termed: ‘new cartographics’.