Sons of the Living (Trespasser 2024) is Bryan Schutmaat’s opus. It is the summation of a decade-plus of making exceptional photographs. I have been familiar with his work for some time, and seeing his work and career grow has been a pleasure. He is also a good dude and supportive of other artists. That should be underscored. I first met Bryan in 2017 in Berlin. Following that, I became aware of his work, mainly through Good God Damn (2018), a book about his buddy Kris that felt intimate but suggested some amount of melancholy, given Kris was due to report to prison shortly after the photographs were made.

Bryan Schutmaat, Kim from Sons of the Living (Trespasser, 2024)

There is a listlessness in the exchange there between photographer and subject, almost an anxiety, a type of Fuck It behavior captured in real-time before Kris was due to be incarcerated. It is my understanding that Kris is no longer with us. Good God Damn opened up the world of Trespasser to me, a publishing cooperative run by Bryan, Matthew, Cody, and Travis. At the time, I was unaware of Bryan’s book Grays the Mountain Sends from 2014, but I understand through the prism of seeing it online that it falls within the vision Bryan has set up for himself through his restless photographing of the American West. He has consistently made work throughout the past decade, which is not the case for many artists. Consistency is the mark of self-assuredness and belief in one’s output. It suggests maturity.

Schutmaat engages with several concerns in his work. Primarily, the work is a photographic extension of the historical canon of the Western American landscape, but there is also a nod to contemporary social issues underneath. You will find references to 19th-century photography in the photographs, mainly the survey photography of Timothy O’Sullivan and the Western photographs of Carleton Watkins. One might also think of C.R. Savage and George Fiske as other notable examples. From there, twentieth-century examples include Ansel Adams, O Winston Link, Richard Avedon (portraits), and arguably Edward Weston. There is a crossover with Dust Bowl-era photographs, and I often think of Dorothea Lange when I look at Bryan’s work. Of the historic soup I mentioned, Watkins, Avedon, Link, and Lange offer a good portion of the broth within the work. Still, critically, it can be seen through contemporary American issues and is not simply a stylized nod to previous generations of photography but offers something more profound. I am also very much reminded of Mark Ruwedel’s Westward the Course of Empire (Yale, 2008) and his subsequent book Message from the Exterior (MACK, 2016) when I think about the West in Bryan’s photographs, particularly the rare but significant images of dwellings.

For me, the most crucial contemporary aspect of Sons of the Living relates to America and labor. It relates to a listless feeling of being unmoored in a country that promised quite a bit, wrote a blank check, and then, when its people needed to cash it, drew insufficient funds at an ATM alongside a vast stretch of highway leaving no other recourse but to continue adrift, vagabonds held to a hidden depression, a dustbowl buried under clouds presenting as the divine. In the book, I believe there is an echo, however imperfect, of the conditions of America in the wake of 9/11, 2008, the fentanyl crisis, and the Trump presidency, or at least people’s reaction to it that can be found in the book. On the latter, it is less of a policy decision than a cultural reaction to the President and Jan. 6th. How the very real, if ugly, mirror of American policy abroad is being held back up to the nation through Trump’s candidacy.

Bryan Schutmaat, Chief Auto from Sons of the Living (Trespasser, 2024)

Biden’s inflationary tendencies and pandemic policies added more gasoline to the fire. All things being as they are, there is no fountainhead of unreason along the American political landscape, but rather a rotting from within, co-sponsored, instead by mandated corporatism. The portraits of strangers he met while traveling symbolize a portion of America dissatisfied with the suburban routine and makes their way from place to place, temporary job to temporary job, not altogether different from the migrants of the 1930s. Some have come to this arrangement without choice.

The people do not fit the cookie-cutter version of America. They are the last vestiges of the migrating, if suffering, free Americans lodged between the infinite and their time here traveling the Southwest. They reflect America as much as someone living in Manhattan or Los Angeles, yet they are invisible in the cliched definition of an American. Bryan has taken notice. The portraits in the book are some of the most vital images. As with the 1930s in America, these portraits of America’s vagabonds, off-grid types, and escape artists are a reminder of the country’s expansive geography and the counterpoints of the American Dream. In God’s Country, the cracks here are large enough to lose people like change through a grate.

Bryan Schutmaat, Jimmy from Sons of the Living (Trespasser, 2024)

The portraits in Bryan’s book remind us that America is a place for people but not a place for everyone. In his travels throughout the Southwest, Bryan would pick up hitchhikers, travel with them for a spell, glean something of their story, and, when permitted, make photographs of his passengers. Spending time with people is becoming a lost art, substituted by cheap social media interactions and boundaries, soft agendas in which we must be constantly aware of feelings over the complete substance of our character. It is a time of distance, intimacy-shrinking, and I am reminded of this when I look at the people in Bryan’s book. Their weathered faces attire attesting to a general state of unease and difficulty.

The people are not the only part of the book that reminds me of contemporary housing matters and class isolation in America. Over the past decade or so, photographically speaking, there has been a rise in interest in the photographs of the Library of Congress, the excellent repository of American documentary photography filed under the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS). Bryan has been harvesting the archive since Grays the Mountain Sends (2014). In his contribution to the Bleak House anthology I edited in early 2021, he submitted a catalog of these clapboard houses in their weathered state of disrepair, a metaphor for the country itself.

This work was underway at the same time as Jeff Ladd’s MACK 2021 book A Field Measure Survey of American Architecture, which also culled images from the HABS archive. More recently, there has been an extended look into the FSA archives for use by several artists who also recall this historical timeline. In the case of the FSA photographs being used, it makes some sense as we are getting close to the centinerrary of the FSA moment. OMEN, published by Editorial RM this year, features a similar enthusiasm for appropriating American collections in this manner. In Bryan’s work, his photographs are more imbued with a sense of melancholy and struggle against a pure form of documentary impulse. They brood and remind one more of Wright Morris’s lyrical approach to the world of the American home. One important note is that there may be an air of bittersweetness in Bryan’s work, but there is no overt decision to wallow in former glory or nostalgia. Instead, there is simply observation and a condition present in those observations.

The book’s edit and sequence are beautifully printed and oversized. The fore-edging and boards are black, which, as an object, keep everything contained, such as a black box, perhaps a distress signal. It is elegant in its simplicity thanks to Cody Haltom’s consistent design, and though I am dismayed at the intrusive nature of large books on my shelf, this and, more recently, Matthew Genitempo’s books are worth the space they consume. The book is sequenced loosely with images of the road at night, in their long exposure, creating something of a track to navigate as they snake in and out of the sequence, suggesting ongoing travel. It mirrors Bryan’s journeys across the southwest and breaks the book into a flashback technique, reminding us that we are traveling along the artist. I am also particularly taken with the images of pears, a still life I had not expected. There is also the image of Chief Auto that resonates and reminds me of Walker Evans’s pictures. Finally, there is Jimmy and his tanned face and pale head; if ever a portrait was, this is one of the mightiest.

I can’t recommend this book highly enough. It is a masterpiece. Bryan is still young enough to make another grand gesture, but for most artists, he has already accomplished a career-defining goal with Sons of the Living. Two thousand nine hundred ninety-nine other people have bought the book, and the first edition is sold out, with a second edition on its way to be printed. That is phenomenal for the market in 2024. Believe the hype.