Jeff Brouws
Car fire, Interstate 40, California, 1995 (from ‘Highway Landscape’)
«I’ve been actively photographing the American cultural Landscape for about 25 years. Initially what I examined were the older elements of roadside culture — what Walker Evans called the “historical contemporary.” At the outset I was on a Road Trip — this was a purely visually engagement: I saw something that attracted me and made a photograph. Yes … I could be in Shamrock, Texas on Route 66, or on Highway 99 in Bakersfield, California, and see the freeway about a quarter mile away in the distance and understand that its presence had displaced whole economies and lifestyles. However, being self-taught and not emerging from an academic environment where I might have learned an interdisciplinary approach to the subject matter, I accentuated the visual, content in the role of photographer. Then two pivotal people came into my life in the early 1990s and opened me up to broader possibilities. I had been in contact with George Thompson at The Center for American Places about a possible book project for their Creating the North American Landscape series. While that project never materialized we had an engaging, supportive correspondence. He urged me to start reading into cultural geography texts to supplement the image making. During this phase I began to fully mine the available literature across the cultural geography spectrum, reading into the works of J. B Jackson, John Stilgoe and others. The lucid content of Jackson’s and Stilgoe’s essays was “a conversion experience to a new way of looking at the built environment.”
© All copyright Jeff Brouws