I’ve heard and read quite a few people responding to the news of the recent death of photographer Joe Deal by expressing their ignorance about him and his work. He was of course one of the photographers in the famed ‘New Topographics‘ show of 1975, which changed the direction of landscape photography and was recently revisted at George Eastman House (though their web site is rather uninformative – there is more at LACMA, and a feature on NPR.)
I first saw his work in reproduction that year, and a little later he was one of the photographers that Lewis Baltz discussed in some detail on his workshop I attended, showing work from his then current project on suburban housing along the San Andreas Fault Line in Southern California. Like many other photographers who worked in the urban landscape I found this show refreshing and it altered all of our work – and you can perhaps see this in at least some of my and other photographer’s projects on the Urban Landscapes web site – such as my Meridian, DLR and other panoramic series.
You can see a good selection Deal’s Fault Zone series and other work from the period on the Robert Mann Gallery site, where he had a show in 2004. There is an obituary by William Grimes in the New York Times with a slide show and you can also see a second show which begins with some of his more recent images at the Robert Mann gallery.
