Jeff Brouws - A visual anthropologist
March 22, 2007 by sil63
I stumbled upon Jeff Brouws’ site by chance and I was immediately captured by his photographs depicting a man-made landscape of unusual fascination.
A self-taught photographer, he has been scouting the American landscape in search of such iconographic subjects as advertising signs, parking lots, gas stations, highways, motels and barns. Humans are banned from his photos so that we are emotionally touched by shapes and colors, lines and empty spaces.
Through Brouws’ images I recalled the coast to coast trip I made back in the eighties. The emotional qualities of the places I visited are still deeply-rooted in me and finding those places and moods in his photographs was an intense moment.
I also think that some of Brouws’ photos have much in common with Edward Hopper’s paintings. See it for yourself here and here.
Jeff Brouws’ work is in major museum collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; The Art Institute of Chicago; and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art.
Published monographs include Approaching Nowhere (W.W. Norton and Company, 2006); Readymades: American Roadside Artifacts (Chronicle Books, 2003); Inside the Live Reptile Tent: The Twilight World of the Carnival Midway (Chronicle Books, 2001); Highway: America’s Endless Dream (Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 1997); and Twentysix Abandoned Gasoline Stations (Gas-N-Go Publications, 1992).
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