Bryan Schutmaat (Austin, Texas, 1983) prefers to focus on the interface between wilderness and civilization. There he photographs man's eternal struggle against nature. With his landscape photos, he portrays the consequences of waste, irresponsible soil exploitation and the disastrous intervention of mankind on ecology.
Photography as a medium to bring about a cultural change. In that sense Schutmaat fits into the tradition of involved photographers such as Lewis Baltz, Robert Adams, Robert Frank, W. Eugene Smith and Dorothea Lange.
Schutmaat first attracted the attention of the photo world with his book Grays the Mountain Sends (2014). A series of portraits and wildlife shots of nearly forgotten communities in the American Rocky Mountains. A beautifully produced book, photographed in lavish colours, which shows that in addition to being a gifted photographer, Schutmaat is also someone who uses the medium effectively to tell a story.
Normally Schutmaat finds his subjects by offering hitchhikers a ride or introducing himself to people at makeshift campsites along the highway. He photographs them with a cumbersome large-format camera on a tripod that necessitates slow work, so that there is room to form a bond with the subjects portrayed.
Travel was strongly discouraged in the early days of the corona pandemic. Many of the people Schutmaat typically portrays belong to the vulnerable segment of the American population and may not have access to mainstream health care. For that reason, Schutmaat did not consider it ethical to continue his usual working method.
Like everyone else during the lockdown, Schutmaat spent most of the time at home waiting for the pandemic to exaggerate, longing for fresh air and freedom of movement. The only space he gave himself was the back roads between Austin—where he lives—and Leon County, the site of Schutmaat's family farm, where he spent his childhood.
This makes 'County Road' Schutmaat's most urgent and most personal project. The black and white photos - taken during the first months of the corona pandemic - offer a quiet, intimate look at the back roads of Schutmaat's life. A life without encounters, painful consequence of the measures to get COVID-19 under control.
While he is usually an extremely thoughtful photographer who takes his time endlessly, he did not take the photos in large format, but with a compact camera. 'County Road' is therefore close to his previous project, 'Good Goddamn', which he realized in the span of just a few days.