Bryan Schutmaat belongs to a new generation of photographers for whom the photography of place is inseparable from the political, emotional, and spiritual undertones of contemporary life. Juxtaposing intimate portraits with images of the American landscape, he explores the realities of the land beyond its physical allure.
Schutmaat’s practice is rooted in a photographic tradition that is linked to the identity of America itself: the heroic optimism of C19th survey photographers such as Timothy O’Sullivan, the starker vision of FSA photographers like Dorothea Lange, and the laconic New Topographics aesthetic of the 1970s. This historical legacy forms the backdrop for a poetic reflection on the present, and on the way that ideals of liberty, democracy and opportunity weigh up against new realities of environmental decline, societal neglect, and economic dispossession.
Photography, for Schutmaat, is a literary and allegorical medium: a means of exploring the enduring links between lives and landscapes, and of portraying the strength and character of his subjects in an authentic way. The places he photographs reflect the reality of his subjects’ immediate circumstances and the traces of their endeavors, but they are also metaphors for something more fundamental about human experience.
Schutmaat’s photographs set historical myths of the American West against a more urgent awareness of collective anxieties in the present. And if they contain elements of longing and nostalgia for a past that no longer exists, they are also expressions of uncertainty and hope for the future that lies ahead.
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