Customer Reviews

Highway: America's Endless Dream

5 star:		(2)
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3 star:		(1)
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Brouws seems to have acquired a photographer's eye that can look behind and around and through the grime and the dust of the highway's edge, and find an unheralded harmony in the play of concrete, neon, and metal. Looking at the photographs one can recognise what was always there, but always overlooked. These are the backdrops to our highway dreams, and so it makes good sense to see these without putting people into the foreground. The essays are cogent and work well as an introduction to the photos. Buy the book, and you'll be seeing the highway in a different light from then on.

Although the book does have a few nice photographs in it and the book does, in fact, catch the "American Dream gone awry," I was disappointed with the book as a whole. This is not to say that it is a bad book. The problem I had was that even though the book is 10.8" x 9.8" many of the pictures are very small. Being a member of the visual generation this book failed to satisfy me with much optical gratification. I would have preferred a book with large images that would grab my attention and bring me back to the memories of days gone by.

Brouws is one of my favorite contemporary photograper and this book proves why. HIGHWAY admirably displays his subtle use of color, elegant compositional eye, and an underlying elegiac tone which he captures, often depicting an American Dream gone awry. Many of the photos seem infused with a Hopper-esque quality; many Springsteen tunes come to mind as well. The inclusion of FSA photographs from the 1930s, and the well-wriiten essays by Polster and Patton, make for a compelling product. This book is a classic and highly recommended.