William Jenkins

William Jenkins is an American photography curator and educator. He organized the 1975 exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York. The exhibition has been described as a turning point in the history of photography. The term "New Topographics," introduced in connection with the exhibition, has since been adopted as a broader descriptor for a genre of landscape photography.

Career at George Eastman House Jenkins began working at the International Museum of Photography at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, where he eventually became Curator of Twentieth-Century Photography. He left in 1979 to join the faculty of Arizona State University. The exhibition presented artists who depicted the built, or human-made, environment in a detached manner. The exhibition included 168 photographs. Jenkins later stated that he wished he had included Ed Ruscha in the exhibition, as it "would have fleshed out that part of it that's not quite so photographic." He also drew connections to the tradition of nineteenth-century topographic survey photographers such as Timothy O'Sullivan and William Henry Jackson.

The label "New Topographics photographers" was considered misleading and objectionable by some of the participants themselves. Several of the participating photographers expressed ambivalence about Jenkins's claims of objectivity and neutrality; Robert Adams later stated that autobiography and metaphor were essential elements of a landscape photograph that Jenkins's framing had understated. Because the exhibition was held at a relatively remote location with limited attendance, some scholars have noted that it did not immediately accelerate the careers of its participants.

In 2009, a large-scale restaging of the exhibition was organized at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, followed by presentations at the George Eastman House, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among other venues, on an eight-city international tour. The work of the Düsseldorf School of Photography, sometimes referred to as the "Becher School," including Andreas Gursky, Candida Höfer, Thomas Ruff, and Thomas Struth, has been associated with a comparable aesthetic. Scholars have noted that a direct influence of the exhibition on the Düsseldorf School, independent of the Bechers, has not been conclusively established. He was recognized as an Honored Educator by the Society for Photographic Education at its West Chapter conference in November 2016.

Curatorial philosophy

Jenkins opened his catalog essay for New Topographics with the declaration that "there is little doubt that the problem at the center of this exhibition is one of style." He characterized the exhibition's viewpoint as "anthropological rather than critical, scientific rather than artistic," stating that its purpose was "simply to postulate, at least for the time being, what it means to make a documentary photograph." By invoking the term "topographic," Jenkins linked the work to nineteenth-century survey photographers such as Timothy O'Sullivan and William Henry Jackson.