A self-styled visual anthropologist, Jeff Brouws explores the growth and construction, entropy and decay, of the man-made landscape. His imaging of common American spaces encourages us to reflect on the human articulation of our vast continental expanse.  Brouws focuses on the vernacular, the unremarkable. Subjects include: highways, gas stations and motels; businesses and factories; fast-food franchises, commercial strip malls and parking lots; inner-city neighborhoods.  While cultural memory is remarkably attenuated, cycles of commercial development and contraction have a long shelf-life. For Brouws, the remains and dissolution of abandoned architecture, signage and other interventions in the landscape have a profound retinal impact.

Beyond the examples of American boom-and-bust obsolescence that Brouws collects—vacant gas stations, demolished gasoline pumps, deserted automobiles, shuttered automobile plants, uninhabited housing projects—his poetic meditation on the landscape is somber and sublime.  A disquieting beauty attends his framing of yawning, empty spaces shot at dusk, at night, in the fog, or during the passing of threatening storm clouds.   There is anomie, a sense of isolation and alienation about these forgotten places.  Brouws’s closely-cropped depiction of the shell of a vacated general store is airless, even stifling.  Such visual absence is evocative of loss—of the diminishment of Main Street.

The strip mall, once the postwar complement to Main Street, has long been the commercial and architectural antithesis of the historic town center.  Brouws has focused in recent years on what he calls the “franchised landscape”: low slung, horizontal big box stores fronted by unyielding acres of asphalt.  The modularity, the serial monotony, of mall construction is suggestive of a relentless logic at work.  Accordingly, Brouws likes to typologically grid his mall and fast food franchise images, presenting them in rows.  This approach acknowledges the influence of artists—particularly Ed Ruscha and Bernd and Hilla Becher—who began to employ photography conceptually from the late 1960s and the early 1970s, serially recording the style-less nomenclature of generic commercial and industrial architecture.

            Many working in the American tradition of documentary landscape photography approach their subject with a cool, detached literalism.  In addition to the 1930s work of Walker Evans, this attitude may be traced back to the later 1975 landmark exhibition, New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape, at the International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House in Rochester, New York.   Participating photographers—among them the Bechers, Robert Adams and Lewis Baltz—employed the medium in a deadpan, critical response to the sameness of suburban sprawl and industrial park development.  The judgmental posture of these artists toward the constructed environment influenced a generation of photographers, like Brouws, who view their native landscape frankly, not as an Eden, but as a dystopia. 

 

Dan Younger

Director

Artist Statement

The photographs before you represent an engagement with America’s cultural landscape over the past nineteen years.  They form a visual timeline representing my growth as a photographer, a maturation of my understanding about the sociological intentions and interconnections underlying the work. 

Starting out innocently, without a predetermined agenda or prescribed way of seeing things, my initial road trips on two-lane highways explored the deserts of the west and examined the main streets of California’s Central Valley. Driven to uncover what the cultural geographer John Brinckerhoff Jackson refers to as “a private kind of vernacular past,” I was drawn to older components of roadside culture that were falling into abandonment due to the thirty-year proliferation of the Interstate freeway system and the suburban sprawl it fostered.  This choice of subject matter wasn’t about nostalgia, but rather engaged what Walker Evans called the “historical contemporary.” I sought to document these places before they were bulldozed into modernization—eradicated by capitalism’s cyclical habit of “creative destruction.” I began thinking like a visual anthropologist, an outsider looking in at my own culture. That notion took on a deeper resonance as I continued to work and my reading into cultural geography expanded. In addition to J.B. Jackson, the writings of Dolores Hayden and John Stilgoe informed this early image making, and continue to inspire my current work.

 Moving to the Northeast in early 1998, I began to collect images from rust belt cities near my home: Buffalo, Gary, Youngstown and Detroit—discarded landscapes transformed by the flight of capital and jobs. I also started making images of everyday “franchised” landscapes—townships ringed by strip malls, fast food restaurants and big box stores—pre-fabricated fields of existence.  Light bulbs went off, connections developed.  Historically, what thought was given to the impact of retail sprawl on commerce in downtown business districts—now shuttered and decaying?   A similar phenomenon left in its wake abandoned factories and homes in the inner city, inhabited by a mostly African-American population.  What correlations can be drawn between a post-war economy based on mass-production, deindustrialization, the loss of union jobs and the rise of suburban outlet malls filled with retail and service sector employment based on mass-consumption?  The built environment reflects a society’s political and material priorities.  Everything in the man-made landscape is placed there for a reason.  The landscape is a physical manifestation of decisions made largely by developers, corporations, investors, local chambers of commerce, government agencies and banks.

 It’s the human cost of all this that we must evaluate. As a nation we don’t think critically enough about what we’ve built and lost in the last fifty years and the impact on our lives. My desire for this exhibition—and my on-going photographic investigation of the components of our cultural landscape—is to go beyond the surface reading of the photographic image.  I hope to ignite discussion about the socio-economic and political underpinnings that inform our built environment.

 --Jeff Brouws