Bryan Schutmaat is a photographer of the American West. His work is dedicated to sites along the interstate highway — forgotten mining towns, abandoned truck stops, weathered billboards, the garbage scattered across dirt roads. What he is attracted to is the region’s extremes: the harsh desert sun, its arid fields, trash heaps of tires, the switchback roads of mountain passes, the vast unforgiving terrains of its inhabitants. It is through these places that he reveals the violence inflicted upon the landscape, the ongoing cycles of dispossession and environmental degradation. Working first in colour for Grays the Mountain Sends (2011 – 2012), then with the monochromatic depth of black and white for his latest book, Sons of the Living (2024), Schutmaat documents how this landscape of dispossession leaves its mark on the terrain and inscribes itself into the lives of the people who inhabit it.
Bryan Schutmaat, Tires from Sons of the Living (Trespasser, 2024)
Bryan Schutmaat, Chief Auto from Sons of the Living (Trespasser, 2024)
As a photographer of the open road, Schutmaat pictures a terrain that feels exhausted and abandoned. It’s a road where the local mechanic has closed up shop, put up a “for sale” sign, and left you nowhere to go. You’re stranded, out of a ride, out of gas, the sky pressing down, with no one stopping to pick you up. A crack in the window fractures the landscape. When cars appear at night, they’re abstracted, streaking across the horizon as blurred strands of light, distant and unreachable, as if forever out of reach. These cars are not stopping to pick you up. You are ok with this. Abandoned to the night, you discover a feeling not tied to movement or escape, but to simply inhabiting that big, open, vast expanse of the desert, as if being there were, somehow, simply enough.
Bryan Schutmaat, Broken Wind from Sons of the Living (Trespasser, 2024)
Bryan Schutmaat, Head Lights E from Sons of the Living (Trespasser, 2024)
Previously, for Gray the Mountain Sends, you accepted this because you found a kind of perfection in these places, despite their inevitable heartbreak: the roadside diner with a single chair at a table, the waitress with red hair, cowboys gathered at a bar. It’s a vision of the West that falls somewhere between Terrence Malick’s Badlands (1973) and Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland (2020), though devoid of any narrative arc. The figures who pass through these spaces are also searching for something — a search made without expectation.
Bryan Schutmaat, Jake’s Cafe from Grays the Mountains Send (2012)
Bryan Schutmaat, Ellie from Grays the Mountains Send (2012)
Schutmaat is part of a new generation of photographers working in an epic mode. Alongside artists like RaMell Ross, Irina Rozovsky, and Gregory Halpern, his work treats the everyday as a gateway to conditions of reverie and revelation, drifting into states that approach an almost mystical feeling and quality. Halpern announced his entry into this mode for his photobook, ZZYZX, a hallucinatory portrait of the city of Los Angeles shot between 2008 and 2014, which he has extended in his latest release, King, Queen, Knave, on the city of Buffalo. Rozovsky created In Plain Air, a stunning book on Prospect Park. For Ross, this vision was found in his film, Hale County This Morning, This Evening (2018), and the accompanying photo project, South County, AL (A Hale County) (2012 – 2014). Ross refers to this phenomenon as the “epic banal,” picturing moments of awe and wonder where quotidian, everyday experience feels as if it is vibrating with an unseen, electrical current.
Bryan Schutmaat, Kim from Sons of the Living (Trespasser, 2024)
In Schutmaat’s case, the epic takes shape as a sweeping visual account that pictures the collective experience of a group, photographing the struggles of drifter and working-class communities encountered off the beaten path. No single historical figure populates his book. Instead, it’s filled with the everyday lives and journeys of highway drifters and seasonal labourers, set against the stark landscapes of the American West. In Sons of the Living, the images are shot in the extreme tonal depth of black and white — a choice that intensifies the desert light and lends an almost otherworldly quality to his scenes (this choice is somewhat akin to how Denis Villeneuve uses it to picture the alien planet of the Harkonnens in Dune II (2024)). This aesthetic choice makes the images feel as though they belong to a different era, distant from our present.
Bryan Schutmaat, Jimmy from Sons of the Living (Trespasser, 2024)
One image I often return to is a photograph from Sons of the Living of a man named Jimmy, his face stained with the dirt of his labor as he slumps against a wall on the pavement. His body, heavy with exhaustion, leans back against a weathered wall of marbled plywood that accentuates the texture of the scene. His face is framed by the residue of labor and sun, etched with the wear of long days as an oil rig worker or a farmhand. He wears sandals with feet dusted from days spent on desert soil. His direct and unguarded gaze meets the camera, acknowledging the photographer and allowing himself to be seen and photographed. This image is founded on a state of waiting — waiting for work, rest, or a ride to the next city, town, or job. This is also what photographers do — they wait. Schutmaat’s photograph is an image for those who understand what it means to wait and the grace and openness required to ask a stranger to take their portrait.
Just as themes of dispossession shape Sons of the Living, they also lie at the core of Schutmaat’s larger publishing project, Trespasser Books, which he co-founded with photographer Matthew Genitempo. This focus on dispossession runs along two key lines. The first centers on a conviction that a vast amount of photographic material remains inaccessible. The second thread reaches back to a historical narrative: the dispossession of land and the erosion of the commons in the American West, as conveyed in Woody Guthrie’s lyrics from “This Land is Your Land” (1944): There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me, Sign was painted, it said private property, But on the back side it didn’t say nothing.
Bryan Schutmaat, Gold Mine from Grays the Mountains Send (2011)
When we exist in a culture of dispossession, marked by the degradation of the world and a diminishment of social relations, a question emerges: what are photography’s powers and capacities to picture this condition?
Rob Bilott on land owned by the Tennants near Parkersburg, W.Va.C. – Bryan Schutmaat for The New York Times
Schutmaat’s interest in dispossession and environmental degradation can be seen in his editorial work, particularly in his portraits of Rob Bilott — the lawyer who famously challenged DuPont — featured in the New York Times Magazine article, “The Lawyer Who Became DuPont’s Worst Nightmare.” Rob Bilott is a Cincinnati-based attorney whose career-defining case began in the late 1990s when he represented residents of Parkersburg, West Virginia, over concerns about water contamination by perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), a chemical used in Teflon production. PFOA is part of a notorious class of “forever chemicals,” which accumulate in human bodies and ecosystems, causing cancer, liver damage, and other grave health issues. Bilott’s 2001 lawsuit against DuPont uncovered years of suppressed evidence showing the company’s awareness of PFOA’s harmful effects. After years of litigation, Bilott’s efforts culminated in a historic $671 million settlement in 2017, with funds allocated for medical studies and health screenings for those impacted by DuPont’s corporate negligence. Bilott’s story was also depicted in the critically acclaimed film, Dark Waters (2019), featuring Mark Ruffalo as Bilott.
In Schutmaat’s portraits of Bilott, he photographs the lawyer against the landscape of Parkersburg, situating the quiet menace lurking beneath the surface of an otherwise ordinary landscape. Schutmaat’s images force the viewer to make a mental leap — to imagine the unseen and pervasive toxicity that now characterizes the landscape and community Bilott fought to protect. This toxicity is not readily visible. It is an unseen presence that haunts the region and its inhabitants, permeating the soil, water, and the bodies of those who reside there — touching nearly everything. The images’ austere and restrained quality asks its viewers to consider what they cannot see — the quiet violence of forever chemicals saturating the environment, unseen but pervasive.
Bryan Schutmaat, Ghost Town Wall from Sons of the Living (Trespasser, 2024)
In a 2019 conversation with Brad Feuerhelm for American Suburb X, Schutmaat considers how today’s photographers are drawn to the American West, where the marks of disaster of westward expansion are etched into the land. Similar to his photographs of Bilott, he describes the work of photographing this landscape as an attempt to reckon with a hidden history of extraction and environmental damage, a slow catastrophe that has seeped into the soil and the lives of those who dwell there. He turns to landscape and portrait photography as a way to strike a correspondence between them.
In very broad terms, it seems that the work made in the West during the 20th century portrays a prolonged event — a disaster, you could say — that unfolded as modernity overtook the landscape and ideologies were instilled in American culture. Photographers currently shooting in the region are looking back at the mess, trying to make sense of the world we now inhabit. In this context, I see my work as somewhat of an elegy, so maybe it’s that plaintive point of view that accounts for the romance you noted, at least in the case of my projects. Disaster continues, new issues come into the fold, people endure, and there’s much more to say. A question continues to arise: how does the reality of today measure up to the promise of the West and its related consequences? I think every generation of serious photographers working here tries to answer this.
Although Schutmaat might be working through extreme states — sublime vistas, hitchhikers with nothing but their possessions on their back — he turns to these modes as a way to forge a relationship. Of course, the photographic genres of portraiture and landscape are separated and autonomous. Yet within the pages of the photobook, they touch and rejoin each other as if they were building off one another in a conversation. Portraiture travels on one path, landscape travels on another. At times, the two encounter each other, and in other instances, they fly off in different directions. For Sons of the Living, this correspondence operates like two voices riffing off one another.
Bryan Schutmaat, Ron from Sons of the Living (Trespasser, 2024)
“The stories of some of these men run parallel to those of the towns they live in, or even of the nation at large,” Schutmaat told the critic Aaron Schuman. “Once young and full of promise, now their great expectations have been shed somewhere during the course of history.” The West might be vast, open, and expansive, yet it feels uninhabitable — dotted with destroyed and abandoned houses, arid fields, and the unshakable sense that those who traverse it are merely passing through, unwelcome and adrift. Schutmaat seeks to establish a correspondence, but what he ultimately uncovers is a dissonance. In the West, this dissonance appears as a gap between the mythology of settler expansion — characterized by notions of freedom, opportunity, and the open road — and its stark reality as a site of social degradation and exhaustion.
This feeling of dissonance is a space he inhabits as a photographer.
Bryan Schutmaat, Gas Sign from Sons of the Living (Trespasser, 2024)