Introducing the work of eight young American photographers, including Stephen Shore, Robert Adams and Lewis Baltz, and showing them alongside the Bechers, the exhibition's curator, William Jenkins, described a "stylistic anonymity" running through their images. Ironic, given that two generations have followed, citing them as a key inspiration.

The show signalled a new approach to landscape photography, severed from the more pictorialist style of Ansel Adams and his passion for fine art craft, in favour of a more critical eye that sublimated beauty. "The world is infinitely more interesting than any of my opinions concerning it," Nicholas Nixon, one of the other eight Americans in the show, added to the catalogue. "This is not a description of a style or an artistic posture, but my profound conviction."

How the show grew to be so influential nobody knows. As Alison Nordström, the current curator of photographs at George Eastman House, notes: "Of those who did see the exhibition, few seem to have thought themselves in the presence of a turning point; paradigm shifts are rarely recognised except in retrospect." It received a small number of mixed reviews and, unlike most exhibitions the institution put together at the time, it didn't tour more than two venues, and the catalogue was "small and unassuming".

But there's no doubting that the ripples from this show spread far and wide. In 1981, Paul Graham and Jem Southam were involved in an exhibition based on the show at the Arnolfini in Bristol (featuring just Adams, Baltz and Joe Deal), curated by Lewis Biggs. And curator Paul Wombell says there was a big interest in New Topographics in the Midlands and the North of England, "due to the closure of large industrial factories, and American photography offered a new way of dealing with this subject".

Now that a new version of the exhibition has gone on show again, organised by George Eastman House and the Center for Creative Photography in Arizona, its influence will continue to endure.

On show
A new version of New Topographics was exhibited in the US at George Eastman House and Los Angeles County Museum of Art last year before travelling to the Center for Creative Photography in Arizona, where it's showing until 16 May, and then at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art from 17 July-03 October. It then comes to Europe, where it will be exhibited at Landesgalerie Linz in Austria from 10 November-09 January 2011, then Photographische Sammlung Stiftung Kultur in Cologne (27 January-03 April 2011), Nederlands Fotomuseum in Rotterdam (25 June-11 September 2011), and Bilbao Fine Arts Museum in Spain (November 2011-February 2012).