Opening the book…
By the late 1960s and into the 1970s, photography stopped behaving as though it had one stable home. It no longer stayed politely inside the frame, appeared only as a single fine print on the wall, and waited to be judged according to older modernist standards of formal control. Instead, it began to move across formats and institutions with far greater freedom. Photographs appeared in books, in sequences, in slide-based works, in installations, in text-driven conceptual projects, and increasingly within the gallery and museum as part of larger systems of display. In other words, photography entered what we call an expanded field: it became less a self-contained medium and more a flexible instrument that could operate through publication, exhibition, archive, installation, and institutional framing. That shift matters because it changed not only how photographs looked, but how they circulated, how they were interpreted, and who had the authority to define them as art.¹
One of the clearest signs of that change is the growing importance of the photobook and the artist’s book. Once photography moved into sequence, layout, and serial form, the viewer’s experience changed dramatically. A book does not ask to be encountered image by image in isolation. It creates rhythm, repetition, pacing, interruption, and narrative drift. The photograph becomes part of a designed experience. This is why books became so central in this period: they were not merely containers for images, but mediums in their own right. Ed Ruscha’s Every Building on the Sunset Strip from 1966 is one of the clearest landmarks here. MoMA identifies it as an accordion-format artist’s book made from a photocollage capturing both sides of a mile-and-a-half stretch of Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles.² The work is photographic, certainly, but it is also panoramic, procedural, and publication-based. It is meant to be unfolded, scanned, and read spatially, not simply admired as a single autonomous image.²
Ed Ruscha, Every Building on the Sunset Strip, 1966
Ruscha’s book is also important because it aligns photography with systems of information. It looks cool, methodical, almost administrative. The city is treated as something to be recorded block by block, frontage by frontage, as though photography were functioning like a filing system or urban dataset. Yet that bureaucratic tone is precisely what gives the work its conceptual charge. Getty’s Ed Ruscha’s Streets of Los Angeles project places the book within a much larger archive of street photography and emphasizes how Ruscha’s sustained documentation of Los Angeles opened onto questions of urban history, visual systems, and archival access.³ In that sense, the artist’s book becomes more than an object of private looking. It becomes a way of thinking about the city, about repetition, and about how photography organizes knowledge.³
The expanded field, however, was never only about multiplying formats. It was also about multiplying institutional pressures. As photography entered museums and galleries more decisively during this period, it became entangled with questions of authority, canon formation, and display. Who was collected? Who was exhibited? Which photographs were framed as art, and which remained categorized as documents, journalism, vernacular material, or evidence? Museums did not simply present photographic meaning; they actively produced it through installation design, wall texts, catalogues, departments, acquisitions, and the cultural prestige of the institution itself.⁴ This is one reason artists became increasingly attentive to archives, catalogs, filing systems, and display conventions. To work with photography in the expanded field was often to work with the politics of presentation itself.
Kikuji Kawada’s The Map (Chizu), published in 1965, is a crucial global anchor because it shows the photobook becoming an object of memory, trauma, and political reckoning rather than a neutral vessel for pictures. The Metropolitan Museum of Art describes the book as having been released exactly twenty years after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and notes that Kawada structured it through images of concrete munitions bunkers, military portraiture, survivors’ scars, and semiabstract details from the decaying interior of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial building.⁵ What matters here is not only the content of the images, but the way the book itself structures experience. History does not appear as a clean narrative. It appears as residue, fragmentation, stain, and scar. The photobook becomes a device for holding trauma in unstable visual form.
Kikuji Kawada, The Ruin of a Stronghold, from the series The Map, 1960–1965.
Kawada also helps expose the politics of access that define the expanded field. SFMOMA’s collection page for The Ruin of a Stronghold supplies the usual museum facts—date, medium, dimensions, and copyright attribution—but those details are inseparable from the institutional conditions through which the work is made visible.⁶ The museum mediates access, reproduction, and circulation. That may sound practical rather than theoretical, but it is actually central to the point. Once photography enters the museum fully, its meaning is shaped not just by what the image shows, but by how the institution governs its visibility. The expanded field therefore includes not only new artistic formats, but also the increasingly visible politics of rights, permissions, collections, and display.⁶
If Ruscha and Kawada help us understand the expanded field through the photobook, William Eggleston helps us understand it through the museum. His 1976 project William Eggleston’s Guide matters because it brought together several of the period’s tensions at once: color photography, book publication, institutional endorsement, and controversy over what serious photography was supposed to be. MoMA’s 1976 press materials announced the book as the museum’s first publication devoted to color photography and paired it with Eggleston’s exhibition at the museum.⁷ That fact alone tells us how charged the moment was. Color had long been associated with advertising, magazines, consumer imagery, and amateur snapshots rather than with the supposedly elevated seriousness of black-and-white art photography. Eggleston’s work did not simply introduce color into the museum. It forced the museum to declare that the ordinary, chromatic world of Southern roadside culture, interiors, signs, tabletops, and casual fragments of life belonged there.⁷
Museum of Modern Art, Photographs by William Eggleston, MoMA, 1976.
Eggleston is essential not only because of color, but because of what color carried with it culturally. His pictures disrupted the older hierarchy that treated black-and-white as artistic and color as commercial. They also unsettled distinctions between fine-art photography and the visual languages of publishing, advertising, and mass media.⁸ That tension is exactly what makes Eggleston so useful in the expanded field. His pictures are formally sophisticated, but they are made from the textures of the ordinary world—cars, ceilings, food, roadside spaces, bits of consumer America. What the museum validated in exhibiting Eggleston was not simply a new palette. It was a new kind of seriousness: one that could emerge from banality, saturation, and the visual atmosphere of everyday life rather than from the older codes of documentary gravity or modernist restraint.⁷
A similar institutional turning point came with the 1975 exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape at George Eastman House. If Eggleston helped legitimize color and the ordinary interior of American life, New Topographics helped legitimize the banal, built, and environmentally altered landscape as a worthy subject of serious photographic attention. The exhibition brought together photographers including Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Joe Deal, Stephen Shore, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Henry Wessel Jr., Frank Gohlke, John Schott, and Nicholas Nixon.⁹ What united them was not a romantic vision of nature, but an interest in tract housing, industrial buildings, roadways, suburban growth, and the man-made transformation of land. The exhibition marked a decisive shift away from heroic landscape traditions and toward a cooler, more observational treatment of built space.⁹
Installation New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape, George Eastman House, 1975.
The importance of New Topographics lies partly in its style. The photographs often appeared restrained, deadpan, and almost affectless. But that coolness was not neutral. It was a way of making visible the cultural logic of suburban expansion, industrial repetition, and environmental alteration without relying on the grand emotional rhetoric of earlier landscape photography.¹⁰ In the museum, those ordinary views acquired a new seriousness. The exhibition effectively argued that the built environment of late modern life—its subdivisions, parking lots, facades, and utility structures—deserved the same sustained attention once reserved for mountains, monuments, or overtly dramatic social events.¹¹ That is a perfect example of the expanded field at work: not only new objects and formats, but new frameworks of value produced through exhibition.
Taken together, Ruscha, Kawada, Eggleston, and New Topographics show that photography in this period was expanding on multiple fronts at once. It was entering books and sequences; it was becoming entwined with text, archive, and conceptual procedure; it was being absorbed more deeply into museums; and it was exposing the power of those institutions to define the terms of visibility. Ruscha shows photography as publication, survey, and urban system. Kawada shows the photobook as memory object and political structure. Eggleston shows how museum validation could transform color and the ordinary into a new photographic seriousness. New Topographics shows the exhibition itself functioning as a turning point, elevating the man-altered landscape and the aesthetics of banality into major artistic territory. Together, they make clear that photography was no longer just an image. It had become a network of objects, contexts, permissions, sequences, and institutional decisions. That is what it means for the medium to enter an expanded field.¹²
Footnotes (MLA)
¹ Ruscha, Ed. Every Building on the Sunset Strip. 1966. The Museum of Modern Art, www.moma.org/collection/works/146931. Accessed 9 Mar. 2026.
² Ruscha, Ed. Every Building on the Sunset Strip. 1966. The Museum of Modern Art, www.moma.org/collection/works/146931. Accessed 9 Mar. 2026.
³ “Ed Ruscha’s Streets of Los Angeles.” Getty Projects, Getty Research Institute, www.getty.edu/projects/ed-ruschas-streets-los-angeles. Accessed 9 Mar. 2026; “Cover.” Ed Ruscha’s Streets of Los Angeles: Artist, Image, Archive, City. Getty Research Institute, www.getty.edu/publications/ruscha/. Accessed 9 Mar. 2026.
⁴ “Photographs by William Eggleston.” The Museum of Modern Art, 24 May–1 Aug. 1976, www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/2079. Accessed 9 Mar. 2026.
⁵ Kawada, Kikuji. Chizu (The Map). 1965. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/844866. Accessed 9 Mar. 2026.
⁶ Kawada, Kikuji. The Ruin of a Stronghold, from the series The Map. 1960–1965. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, www.sfmoma.org/artwork/2002.65.11/. Accessed 9 Mar. 2026.
⁷ “WILLIAM EGGLESTON’S GUIDE.” The Museum of Modern Art, 25 May 1976, www.moma.org/docs/press_archives/5392/releases/MOMA_1976_0052_41.pdf. Accessed 9 Mar. 2026.
⁸ “COLOR PHOTOGRAPHS BY WILLIAM EGGLESTON AT THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART.” The Museum of Modern Art, 1976, www.moma.org/docs/press_archives/5391/releases/MOMA_1976_0051_40.pdf. Accessed 9 Mar. 2026.
⁹ “New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape.” George Eastman Museum Collections, 14 Oct. 1975–2 Feb. 1976, collections.eastman.org/exhibitions/3417/new-topographics-photographs-of-a-manaltered-landscape. Accessed 9 Mar. 2026.
¹⁰ “New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape.” George Eastman Museum Collections, collections.eastman.org/exhibitions/3417/new-topographics-photographs-of-a-manaltered-landscape/objects. Accessed 9 Mar. 2026.
¹¹ “American Silence: The Photographs of Robert Adams.” National Gallery of Art, www.nga.gov/exhibitions/american-silence-photographs-robert-adams. Accessed 9 Mar. 2026.
¹² Ruscha, Ed. Every Building on the Sunset Strip. 1966. The Museum of Modern Art, www.moma.org/collection/works/146931. Accessed 9 Mar. 2026; Kawada, Kikuji. Chizu (The Map). 1965. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/844866. Accessed 9 Mar. 2026; “WILLIAM EGGLESTON’S GUIDE.” The Museum of Modern Art, 25 May 1976, www.moma.org/docs/press_archives/5392/releases/MOMA_1976_0052_41.pdf. Accessed 9 Mar. 2026; “New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape.” George Eastman Museum Collections, 14 Oct. 1975–2 Feb. 1976, collections.eastman.org/exhibitions/3417/new-topographics-photographs-of-a-manaltered-landscape. Accessed 9 Mar. 2026.
This page titled 14.12: Photography in the Expanded Field was last modified on Wed, 05 Aug 2026 02:40:25 GMT and is shared under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by James William Moore.
The book could not be loaded just now.