 Photo by Hilary Harvey |
Jeff Brouws is a connoisseur of TOADS, an acronym used by ethnic geographers to describe temporary, obsolete, abandoned, and derelict sites. TOADS are the detritus of the American throwaway culture writ large—crumbling factories, empty motel swimming pools, public housing projects gone to rot, vacant storefronts on Main Streets across the country. In Brouws's latest book, Approaching Nowhere (W.W. Norton, 2006), Brouws collects TOADS like Alan Lomax made field recordings of folk songs—not for the sake of nostalgia, but to chronicle the last vestiges of a disappearing part of the American landscape. Broken into three sections—"The Highway Landscape," "The Discarded Landscape," and "The Franchised Landscape"—Approaching Nowhere is a visual anthropological tour of the American past, present, and future, sometimes all in one image, as in a photograph of a superstore being constructed on recently cleared Indiana farmland, from 2004.
Although the landscape portraits in Approaching Nowhere are from locales as diverse as Gary, Indiana, and Needles, California, Brouws, a Red Hook resident, included some local shots as well, such as an eerie image of the Ames store in Hudson shortly after its closing in 2002.
Brouws will exhibit photos from Approaching Nowhere at the Robert Mann Gallery in Manhattan, September 6 through October 14. Portfolio at www.jeffbrouws.com. —Brian K. Mahoney
Jeff Brouws on his work:
 Sign without Signification, Ludlow, California, 2004 |
There's a wonderful quote from Walker Evans, where he once defined nostalgia as being "the blurry vision which destroys the actuality of the past." He instead was more interested in what he termed the "historical contemporary." Nostalgia has never been my intent, either: I have always simply photographed what was in front of me as a reflection of present time. I didn't photograph a building or site in 1992 wishing I could have made the photograph in 1950. Even though I've been a photographer 35 years, I believe a photograph can't necessarily tell the whole story. That's why photojournalism came into existence. Somebody, somewhere, realized that images without text have limited range. Similarly, singular images can't convey what a series of photos can more broadly address—which is why I make books and work on specific projects or bodies of work. No single image has to carry the whole weight of the idea. I would love you, as a viewer, to walk into the gallery and know all my internal thoughts when you're looking at the photographs—but that's not possible.
 Route 285, Vaughn, New Mexico, 1997 |
Photographs have the capability of being multi-dimensional. They can be historical documents, narrative in nature, or can often enter the realm of metaphor or allegory. As an artist/photographer however, I don't over-calculate with the camera and say, "Okay, now I'm going to make a social document" or "Now I'm going to make an image that's metaphorical." However, these different qualities emerge through you as you're making the work. I hope that as you look through Approaching Nowhere, the photographs do hit you in different ways on different levels. Some will be in a social-documentary vein, while others, perhaps, will function in a more emotional, metaphorical, or moody way. While I don't think I've ever consciously gone out to emulate the films of David Lynch or the paintings of Edward Hopper, I see definite threads of their influence.