Deal, Joe. Joe Deal: New Topographics. Northlight 4.

Arizona State University, 1977. Spiral bound, 19 pages plus several unnumbered pages, including a reproduction of a landscape photo by Joe Deal. Interview with Joe Deal about his growth and development as a photographer by Nasrallah S. Behbehani, including how he became involved in the very well known New Topographics exhibition at the George Eastman House. [At the time of the interview, Deal was on the faculty of the University of California at Riverside. He was visiting Arizona State as a guest lecturer and judge of a state-wide student photography competition.] Scarce. Six copies held by libraries indexed in WorldCat. Like new. Summary:

Joe Deal: New Topographics (published in 1978 as Issue No. 4 of the Northlight publication series by the Department of Art at Arizona State University) is a monograph documenting photographer Joe Deal’s influential contribution to the landmark 1975 New Topographics movement. Edited by James Hajicek, the publication features a essay and interview alongside plates showcasing Deal’s distinct altered-landscape photography.

Core Themes & Subject Matter

• Man-Altered Landscape: The monograph focuses on Deal's suburban landscapes in Southern California and the American Southwest, documenting how natural environments are systematically reshaped by residential housing developments, grading, and suburban sprawl.

• Neutral, Unemotional Aesthetic: Deal’s work embodies the central ethos of the New Topographics movement: an objective, "topographical" approach that deliberate avoids romanticized Western wilderness aesthetics in favor of a clinical, dispassionate view of human intervention.

• Formal Precision & High Viewpoints: The images frequently feature elevated or distant perspectives, flattening the landscape into geometric grid-like arrangements of dirt tracks, foundation slabs, and cookie-cutter housing plots to highlight the artificial ordering of space.

• Subtle Environmental Critique: Rather than presenting overt environmental activism, Deal’s photographs present a quiet, ironic critique of suburban expansion, inviting viewers to reflect on human consumption, displacement, and the changing definition of land.

Joe Deal (1947–2010) was an American photographer, educator, and leading figure in the New Topographics movement who reshaped modern landscape photography. Born in Topeka, Kansas, he earned a BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute and an MFA from the University of New Mexico, studying under photography luminaries like Van Deren Coke and Beaumont Newhall. Deal gained widespread international recognition in 1975 as one of the nine photographers featured in William Jenkins’s seminal exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape at the George Eastman House. Alongside his creative output—which earned him two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship—Deal had a distinguished career in higher education, serving as a professor and administrator at the University of California, Riverside, and later as Dean of the School of Art at Washington University in St. Louis and Provost of the Rhode Island School of Design before his passing in 2010.