Jeff Brouws at Robert Koch

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San Francisco-based, self-taught photographer Jeff Brouws has spent the past 20-some years wending his way around the United States, taking pictures of what he calls "readymades": found landscapes at once stereotypical and strange, desolate yet abundant, and that frequently include signage. His latest captivating project, "Approaching Nowhere," includes more of the same. It takes the form of a monograph nearly a foot square that includes 100 images (published by W.W. Norton). This recent show presented 15 of these lusciously printed pictures, mostly in a 29-inch-square format. As a group, they offer a timely opportunity to meditate on some of the less-than-flattering manifestations of the American dream.

Highway 14, Mojave, California, 1992, a nighttime photograph, shows a brown-skinned man standing next to a glowing lamp as he peers out from behind a dirty window with the words "HBO free" painted on it. Another sign obscuring part of the window reads "$19.00 up," suggesting a seedy motel. There's an unexpectedly pleasing chromatic echo of the man's bright orange sweatshirt in the surrounding reddish window frame and the crimson sign paint.

Superstore Under Construction in Farmland Indiana, 2004 looks rather like a screen for a gigantic drive-in movie theater. A foot-ball-field-sized slab of concrete stands propped up with metal rods, surrounded by mud and mounds of gravel and dirt. Like many of Brouws's strongest images, this one employs a three-part compositional scheme of sky, architecture and earth. Each element takes up more or less a third of the frame. Farmland Adjacent to Superstore Construction, Indiana, 2004 is similarly arranged. Tiny farmhouses and silos dot the horizon behind it, a quiet commentary on the social and environmental impact of mass production and consumption.

The surplus of space in rural America repeatedly fascinates Brouws, as in Route 62, Vidal Junction California, 1994, which shows a defunct gas station in the middle of nowhere. Cheer emanates from the modern, slickly designed light posts that once illuminated the isolated business; someone once took care to paint the station's canopy fire-engine red, and to plant squat palm trees in front. By the time Brouws decided to photograph it, however, the station had been half demolished and riddled with graffiti. Through what used to be windows, in Brouws's consistently thoughtful composition, flat land stretches out as far as the eye can see, right up to a lovely range of purplish mountains.

This landscape is, like much of the USA, beautiful in its barren way. But this particular scene is also indicative of how Americans whose enterprises fail frequently don't feel as though they have to clean up after themselves, perhaps because they've never had the experience of scarcity.

COPYRIGHT 2007 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning