Peter Brown, in an interview with David Pollock for Urbanautica. See also Peter Brown’s excellent essay on Robert Adams, and an engaging conversation he had with Bryan Schutmaat for Ahorn.

“What both works most consistently declare as a whole is an unwavering faith in the narrative power of photographic image - in its capacity to ‘see a city in a street’, to paraphrase John Berger. Berger said of Paul Strand’s work that “Such photographs enter so deeply into the particular that they reveal to us the stream of a culture or a history which is flowing through that particular subject like blood.”  

Bryan’s work, it seems to me, is born out of this bedrock, this same faith. Faith in the possibility of an imaginative leap is surely the indispensable prerequisite of all photography, and the measure of excellence in a photograph must I think bear a direction relation to the ease with which that leap is made. This is not to say that good images cannot reveal themselves gradually, but rather that even a gradual revelation has in the end the feeling of inevitability. Heartland has this same character of integrity, of inevitability, of genesis - its subjects correspond, echo, reinforce, expand upon and refine each other. The work finds great graft, great virtue and at times humbling beauty in the heartland.”

— quoted from this essay on Bryan Schutmaat’s “Heartland”.

excerpted from a forthcoming essay on Bryan Schutmaat’s “Heartland”.

(Source: greatleapsideways)

“Walking Rain” by Peter Brown.

I love it when photographers make fine portraits of other photographers, as in this one by Jan Postma of Bryan Schutmaat - reblogged from Jan’s blog bolus.

“In a relative sense, America has a small literary mythology but an immense visual mythology in common Western consciousness. Moreover, as so much 20th century road-trip photography demonstrates in telling and often ironic ways, more than many other countries (perhaps all?) America images itself back to itself, it is rife with images of its own landscape, with visual proof of the forcefulness of its history and the promise of its landscapes. It is against the weight of these multiple histories - those of commemoration and those of erasure, those of tradition and slippery actuality - that Bryan Schutmaat’s “Heartland” is situated. It seeks to assess, interrogate and re-imagine that culture through the prism of its ‘heartland’ landscapes.”  

— excerpted from forthcoming essay on Bryan Schutmaat’s “Heartland”