Joe Deal, a photographer who broke with the romantic tradition of Ansel Adams to document, with scientific detachment, a Western landscape reshaped by human hands, died Friday in Providence, R.I. He was 62. The cause was bladder cancer, his daughter, Meredith Ivy Deal, said.
Mr. Deal emerged as a leading figure in the new wave of American photographers when 18 of his black and white photographs were included in the enormously influential exhibition “New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape.” The exhibition, which William Jenkins organized at the George Eastman House in Rochester in 1975, is now regarded by historians as a turning point in American photography.
As director of exhibitions at Eastman House, Mr. Deal played an important role in formulating and designing the exhibition and in producing its catalog.
Like his fellow exhibitors Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Stephen Shore and Bernd and Hilla Becher, Mr. Deal rejected the sweeping romanticism of Adams and Edward Weston in favor of a jaundiced, dry-eyed inspection of the modern American landscape and its degradation at the hands of developers, corporations and suburban colonizers. It was an approach that Mr. Jenkins called “anthropological rather than critical, scientific rather than artistic.”
Instead of pristine vistas, viewers were presented with tract houses, industrial sites, motels, warehouses and highway projects. In a deadpan, uninflected style, Mr. Deal showed mundane, newly built homes in the arid landscape around Albuquerque and Boulder City, Nev.
“In making these photographs I attempted to make a series of images in which one image is equal in weight or appearance to another,” he wrote in an artist’s statement for the exhibition catalog. Believing that “the most extraordinary images might be the most prosaic,” he deliberately kept formal decisions to a minimum, preferring to manipulate the images as little as possible and eliminate, as far as possible, “personal intrusion.”
Joseph Maurice Deal was born on Aug. 12, 1947, in Topeka, Kan. After earning a bachelor’s degree in fine arts at the Kansas City Art Institute in 1970, he was granted conscientious-objector status and, fortuitously, sent to Eastman House to work as a guard and janitor instead of serving in the military.
By the early 1970s he was exhibiting at the Light Gallery in Manhattan. He received a master’s degree in photography from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, in 1974. After returning to Eastman House, he began teaching at the University of California, Riverside, while completing a thesis for his master of fine arts degree, granted in 1978, from the University of New Mexico.
At Riverside, he started the photography program and helped found the California Museum of Photography (now the University of California, Riverside/California Museum of Photography).In 1989 Mr. Deal was appointed dean of the school of art at Washington University in St. Louis. In 1999 he became the provost of the Rhode Island School of Design, where he also taught photography. He lived in Providence for the rest of his life.
His first two marriages ended in divorce. In addition to his daughter, Meredith, of Boston, he is survived by his father, Percy, of Albuquerque, and his wife, Betsy Ruppa.
After “New Topographics,” Mr. Deal turned his attention to the uneasy coexistence of man and nature along the San Andreas Fault in Southern California, producing a portfolio of images, “The Fault Zone,” that juxtaposed the hasty activity of human beings with the inexorable, drawn-out processes of geology.
Mr. Deal adopted a style of close-up inspection in “Subdividing the Inland Basin,” a record of suburban subdivisions east of Los Angeles, and “Beach Cities,” whose images of Southern California oceanfront communities became some of Mr. Deal’s best-known work.
n recent years he photographed in the Midwest. In his portfolio “West and West: Reimagining the Great Plains,” he used the camera to impose a gridlike square that alludes to the grids mapped out after the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. These photographs were organized for a traveling show now at the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona, Tucson, until Aug. 1.
In 2009, the center, in collaboration with Eastman House, partly recreated “New Topographics” as a traveling exhibition, using more than 100 photographs from the 1975 show. It is scheduled to open at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art on July 17.
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