Random Excellence: Bryan Schutmaat

Photo by Bryan Schutmaat

Reaching across genres—using photographs of objects, buildings, interiors, landscapes, and portraits—Bryan Schutmaat has attempted to show what life is like in the half-forgotten old mining towns of the American West.

You'll definitely want to see the whole set online. It's called "Grays the Mountain Sends."

Mike
(Thanks to Enrique G.)

Original contents copyright 2013 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

TOP's links!

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Andre: "Several of the places Bryan Schutmaat photographed look very familiar to me. One I recognize for sure: Tonopah, Nevada. You can make out the big red letters spelling out 'Mizpah Hotel' on top of one of the buildings. I grew up about 100 miles from there, and as my dad was interested in prospecting we checked out all sorts of old mines, mills, ghost towns, and towns inexorably heading for ghost town status.

"Mr. Schutmaat's done an excellent job of capturing the mood of these places. The residents tend to be hardy and grizzled, and with the low populations and isolation often don't have a lot to do. Prior to the advent of satellite TV you often couldn't receive any TV or radio stations in those places, except at night when you'd tune in the high-power stations from Mexico or southern California. Adults made their own entertainment, playing cards, drinking, etc. Kids dreamed about getting out, to the 'big cities' like Reno or Vegas. Dilapidated buildings and decaying cars litter the edges of town.

"For the indoor scenes, throw on some 1970s country music to set the mood. Outdoors it tended to be remarkably quiet, although sound carried a long ways—if a semi was passing by on the highway, you'd often hear it when it was still a couple of miles away."

Richard Khanlian: "Wow! Lovely and wistful and sad."

Jim Skates: "As I was looking at the photographs on his site I was thinking that these seemed very familiar. I then looked at his resume and realized that he had sent his film to the lab where I work and I had sleeved his negatives. It was great to to see them in a positive way."

Mike replies: Herman Krieger is going to appreciate that last comment.

Andy Goss: "Very evocative photos. Unfortunately, I forwarded to my wife the link to his work. She noticed an evident mistake the photographer made, which greatly reduces the value of his work (to me). Except by a great cosmic chance, in two of the pictures there appears to be the same jar of peanut butter, having the same signature wave of gap in the peanut butter visible along its side. Most likely a plant in the photos. A set-up. Makes me wonder what else in the photos staged indoors is a setup. The outdoors photos especially are still wonderful, but I had enjoyed and been moved by them all, until this."

Mike replies: Sharp eye on the part of your wife. She's talking about this detail from the TV interior:

And this detail from the turkey-in-the-oven interior:

However, knowing how many photographers work, I think it's very likely that both shots were simply made in the same home, possibly where the photographer stays when he's out West or the home of one of his friends. The scenario you and she are suggesting—the photographer carting around the same jar of peanut butter to different domiciles for use as a prop—violates Occam's Razor!

(Side note to Andy: I did get your reply, but if you want to have a private conversation with me, you need to give me some way to contact you.)

Comments

[Torsten Bronger]

Marvellous. The portraits are too much "bokeh hunting" for my personal taste, but the warm winter sun underlines the mixture of life and decay in the pictures. Bookmarked.

[Jerome]

I spend a lot of time browsing photos on the web, but rarely do I find myself so captivated that I feel the urge to comment. Thank you for sharing this, the photos are breathtaking. And he makes interiors, portraits and landscapes all speak the same "language". Excellent.

[Justin Watt]

Bryan Schutmaat's photo "Train Yard" is one of the few artworks I appreciated enough to feel compelled to purchase a print for myself from 20x200. Not exactly sure what up with http://20x200.com/ these days (seems they're relaunching/rebooting), but here's a URL of the photo on Flickr:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jenbee/4500306355/

[John Krumm]

Definitely fits in with Ctein's article on presenting one's work well. I enjoyed the landscapes, but wanted to learn a little more about the people, who sometimes seemed presented just to gawk at. Anyone who knows humanity knows we have more than grim and flat expressions, even in depressed areas like old mining towns.

[Keith I.]

I could look at these over and over. Remarkable images.

[rnewman]

Mike and Enrique, thanks. Bryan Schutmaat's work is excellent. I have seen some of these semi-abandoned towns (although I don't recognize these specific scenes), and he captures their feeling well.

[Gato]

A very nice set of pictures, but to me these cry out for captions -- who is this person, where is this place, what's the story here?

[Bill]

Beautiful, and so sad.

[Victor Bloomfield]

Superb work. Thanks for letting us know about it.

[Steven Willard]

Wonderful work. Thanks for the heads up.

[Bob Dales]

Wonderful work that reveals the essence of these forlorn places. Thanks for finding it Mike.

You can pre-order the book from silasfitch.org or from his web site.

bd

[Kenneth Tanaka]

Yes, indeed, this is a very effective essay.

Bryan won Aperture's 2013 Portfolio Prize. Those of you in, or visiting, NY can see some of this work on display at the Aperture Foundation until the end of October.

[expiring_frog]

Very compelling, thanks Mike.

[Ed Grossman]

Great stuff. Inspires me to raise my game.

[Marty]

Beautiful work, great documents of these people and places. Sad too, but in a uniquely American way.

[James Sinks]

Bryan is a very good photographer, and he's shot some beautiful landscapes and details...but I don't understand the appeal of the "pose stiffly and look bored" school of portraiture. A bunch of awkward, emotionally vacant portraits add nothing to my understanding of mining towns.

[Jeffrey Lee]

Gorgeous and unique. Thankfully presented with a total lack of text to get in the way. Seeing someone let the images stand alone is so refreshing.

[Lynn]

Bookmarked. Also makes me appreciate quiet colour, Mike.

[Colin]

Absolutely wonderful images, but I have to agree with John Krumm's comment above - I would have liked to see more humanity discovered, too much defeat, these people must smile, however rarely. I felt the images didn't give me - or the subjects - enough freedom. And just one (beautiful, but face hidden) woman?

[Svein-Frode]

Stunning work indeed. I've looked through that portfolio almost daily for months now. My favourite work of 2013!

[James Sinks]

A lot of the photos are clearly staged/directed/posed. But I also don't see the big deal re: the peanut butter. To me, at least, the more galling photographic manipulation is in the cooking turkey photo, where all the food packaging has been carefully arranged so we can't see the brand names or logos clearly. It's a cheap attempt to add a frisson of timeless nostalgia to the image.

[Justin Watt]

It tickles me how the photographic medium lulls even its practitioners into conflating the photograph with reality. The very wonderful thing about photography, the reason it is so obviously an art, is precisely because it is not reality. Thank goodness we don't all sign an oath of documentation each time we pick up a camera, or perhaps it would have been unethical for me to remove that distracting wine glass from the frame of a photo of a plate of food I recently took, or for Bryan Schutmaat to arrange the spice jars just so or to incorporate (perhaps accidentally) the same jar of peanut butter in two different shots. In fact there's nothing in that body of work that conveys photojournalism or street/found photography to me at all; to judge them as if he had just stumbled upon these scenes strikes me as disingenuous. What I see are painterly still-lifes, meant to capture and distill and evoke something about a place that is altogether difficult to capture. As such, I find them very evocative. The challenge for Bryan (and for all of us, really) is that his approach doesn't become so refined that it becomes cliched. Which hints at the only fault I can find---that the obvious beauty of the images tends towards the predictable.