Customer Reviews

Readymades: American Roadside Artifacts

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Yet another roadie book but `Readymades' is a cut above the usual photographic selection of what can be seen along the nation's back roads. For a start the book is landscape, just the right shape for images that are basically horizontal. Secondly the photos are divided into sections rather than loosely hung together by state or date order. Thirdly the choice of material is refreshing, for example, tract housing, freight cars, trailers or storage units (no kidding).

This is Jeff Brouws second road book, his first, the excellent `Highway: America's Endless Dream', was more the traditional photographic road book, a mixture of everything plus a selection of interesting black and white images from the thirties and forties. I like the formal arrangement of `Readymades'. By having each of the eleven chapters devoted to a particular theme he "presents the subject in the most factual terms possible" as Diana Gaston says in her intro. The chapters are tract housing, signs, abandoned drive-ins, farms, pickups, abandoned gas stations, boxcars, signs two, trailers, bowling and finally storage units.

Partially painted pickup trucks are just that, twenty-five of them are all taken side on and nicely framed within the image area. Twenty-six abandoned gas stations (in black and white) are one to a page and just the sort of thing Robert Frank would have stopped his car for back in the fifties. Freight cars, again one to a page and neatly framed, are an amazing colored selection of various shades of rust and railroad livery. Perhaps the most unusual chapter is storage units, hardly the sort of thing to capture the creative eye but here they are, eighteen shots including a stunning one taken in West Virginia in 2001 showing three power station cooling towers in the distance, the storage units in the middle and a parking lot in the foreground. The photos of these units remind me of Lewis Baltz and his photos of the industrial parks in Irvine, CA, simple oblongs just placed in the landscape.

`Readymades' is a refreshing look and presentation of the vernacular everyday and I think it might well turn out to be a classic photo book of the decade.

***FOR AN INSIDE LOOK click 'customer images' under the cover.

This is a testimony. A book that maybe can't be done anymore. A reminder of a lost identity among franchise. A poem to the past.

A great photographer is one who sees the beauty in the banal and everyday aspects of our surroundings, and frames and shoots so that these things are brought to our attention. And so it is with Jeff Brouws. "Readymades" is a collection of subjects that are so much a part of America's cultural landscape that they are barely noticeable; 60's tract homes repainted in bright, hot colours; pick-up trucks with dents, primer touch-ups and replacement panels; ruins of the 20th century - drive-ins and gasoline stations; farmyard buildings; neglected freight cars and trailer homes in various states of abandonment, ten-pin bowling buildings and accompanying signs, roadside and inner-city signs advertising goods and services long forgotten, and even an artifact of the current age - storage units - which already have an aura of desolation.

My favorite series is of the "Partially Painted Pick-Up Trucks". Deeply American; all of these vehicles indicate a gritty, blue-collar life, yet there is something in them that is inexplicably beautiful and noble. The ghostly and forlorn aspect of the abandoned drive-ins and gasoline stations bring to mind the questions - "who worked here"? and "did this place really mean anything to anyone"?. "Do they ever think of it" and even "where are these people now"? "Dead? - and does anyone care"?

Books of this type are quite often large and unwieldy (big pictures usually equals bigger visual impact). This one is small (15cm x 23.5cm x 2.5cm) and much easier to handle, but this does not reduce the value of the photography; the power of the images has been retained. For its genre, the book is exceptionally good value (particularly for the current price on Amazon); 272 pages, including over 220 crisp, sharp images. The essays accompanying each section are short and enjoyable, being as they are personal reflections by different contributing writers who have some real connection to the subjects, and - thankfully - there is no tedious discussion of photographic technicalities or of the merits of urban photography. Overall, this is a thorough exploration of the range of Jeff Brouws' work. After this, I would strongly recommend his "Approaching Nowhere" - a much larger book in terms of size, but a closer and deeper examination of the American landscape.