Occupation Photographer | Name Jeff Brouws | |
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Born 1955 San Francisco, California Website | ||
Jeff Brouws (born in 1955 in San Francisco, California) is a self-taught documentary photographer who resides in Upstate New York.
Contents
Photography
Brouws, using myriad photographic approaches—from narrative stand-alone images to groupings of typologies—has spent the last 27 years visually exploring the American cultural landscape from a historical and socio-economic perspective. His subject matter includes: nuclear weapons and their past and present legacy, vernacular roadside architecture, the franchised landscape of big box stores and strip malls, suburbia, inner city environments, de-industrialized / post industrial cities of the northeast, and the contemporary and historical railroad landscape. With an affinity for what cultural geographers classify as TOADS (temporary, obsolete, derelict, abandoned sites) Brouws’s practice involves what he refers to as “visual anthropology.” Initially inspired by New Topographic photographers like Robert Adams, Joe Deal and Lewis Baltz, he also counts the photography of Walker Evans, Camillo Jose Vergara, Hilda and Bernd Becher, Ed Ruscha, Mark Ruwedel, and Allan Sekula as important touchstones.
Since the early 1990s his work has also been intellectually informed by the writings of cultural geographers, historians and social critics like J.B. Jackson, John Stilgoe, Dolores Hayden, Leo Marx and Mike Davis. These writers provided for Brouws “a conversion experience to a new way at looking at the built environment.”
Representation and Exhibitions
Brouws is represented by the Robert Mann Gallery in New York City; the Robert Koch Gallery in San Francisco, The Robert Klein Gallery in Boston, and the Craig Krull Gallery in Santa Monica. He was also represented by Galeria Toni Tapies in Barcelona from 2009-2012. His work has been featured in over 25 solo exhibitions and a similar number of group shows including two recent iterations of Ed Ruscha: Books & Co., which appeared at the Gagosian Gallery, New York City, March–May, 2013 and the Brandhorst Museum Munich, June–September, 2013.
His work can be found in numerous public and private collections including: The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Cleveland Museum of Art, The Fogg Museum, Princeton University Art Museum, the Henry Art Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Publications
In 1992 Brouws self-published a book homage to the artist Ed Ruscha entitled Twentysix Abandoned Gasoline Stations, referencing that artist’s publication of a similar title from 1963.
He has had several other books published of his own work including Highway: America’s Endless Dream, Stewart, Tabori and Chang, 1997; Inside The Live Reptile Tent: The Twilight World of the Carnival Midway (text by Bruce Caron), Chronicle Books, 2001; Readymades: American Roadside Artifacts, Chronicle Books, 2003; and Approaching Nowhere (text by William Fox), W. W. Norton, 2006. He is also the editor and co-author (with Hermann Zschiegner, Wendy Burton, Phil Taylor and Mark Rawlinson) of Various Small Books: Referencing the Various Small Books of Ed Ruscha, MIT Press, 2013.
In additional he has authored or co-authored four books on railroad photography featuring the work of other artists. These titles include: Starlight On The Rails, Harry Abrams, 1999; A Passion for Trains: The Railroad Photography of Richard Steinheimer, W. W. Norton, 2004; The Call of Trains: Railroad Photographs by Jim Shaughnessy, W. W. Norton, 2008; and Some Vernacular Railroad Photographs, W. W. Norton, 2013.
His work has also appeared in Harper’s, The New Yorker, and The New York Times Magazine among others.
He has lectured as a visiting artist at: Syracuse University, Texas State University, School of Visual Arts, Kenyon College, St. John Fischer College, Williams College, San Jose State, the Museum of Photographic Arts, and Vassar College.
Awards
Brouws is also the recipient of two awards from the Railway and Locomotive Historical Society: the George and Constance Hilton Book Award given for A Passion for Trains: The Railroad Photography of Richard Steinheimer in 2005; and the John H. White Fellowship for research on southern railroad photography in 2013.