When confronted with any set of images or photographs in series, it is instinctual to try and form an understanding of what is being communicated. In the absence of being explicitly told, we sub-consciously begin to form relationships between the images that help constitute for us, a narrative or story we can hang onto. We […]
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 […]
“I was very motivated by Deborah’s Bright’s 1985 essay: Of Mother Nature and Marlboro Men, which stressed the importance of differing subjective viewpoints from the established patriarchal vision”
“Vandalism” is a way in which to authorize or sign off on a negation of agreement of form and intent. It is to suggest that at its heart, what vandalism does is to distort the fabric of time in appearance governed by the individual” Crypto-architecture is not purposeful on the plane of first person experience. […]
“I think the darkness at the periphery of the work also comes from a desire to acknowledge a certain brutality inherent to the history of the western landscape, and to the struggle for survival within it.”
“Everything is unknown, sifted through bit by byte and re-assembled for the purpose of defining the in insalubrious possibility of chance and enforced meaning- Nothing exists, Everything exists if harvested and re-distributed credibly and with rugged vigor”
‘linoleum buckles on counter tops, and unseasoned lumber twists walls out of plumb before the first occupants arrive.’
“My work in the landscape is ultimately about human culture, not about nature. I always think of landscape as historical, or historicized; as not existing outside of history.”