TOME RAIDER: Approaching Nowhere

A range of distant mountains on the left, telephone wires on the right, a barren pocked road disappearing into the horizon: We are “approaching nowhere.” The cover establishes the melancholy mood prevalent in the collection of 20 years of photographer Jeff Brouws’s work.

At first glance, “Approaching Nowhere” appeals to the average over-worked Harvard student’s escapist fantasies. Full-page photographs of empty highways ending in mist and deserted rest areas blend in with the barren landscape: you can almost feel the wind whistling in your ears. On closer examination, however, Brouws, far from endorsing the dream of travel, in fact denounces the dystopia of the American Dream and its obsession with mobility of all kinds.

Though Brouws’s social criticism is effective without being heavy-handed or militant, it is not immediately comprehensible to a casual viewer. Brouws recognizes this in his concluding essay, written precisely because of this ambiguity: “Beauty often merges with political or social content, even when those qualities seem at cross-purposes...[Photographs] can beautify a subject we normally might not deem beautiful.”

There is no doubt that Brouws’s photographs are aesthetically pleasing: they capture the magical atmosphere of desolate landscapes with unfailing honesty. This is especially remarkable since his subjects—what urban geographers call TOADS (Temporary Obsolete Abandoned Derelict Sites)—are traditionally considered unaesthetic and unnoteworthy. It is ironic, then, that the elements that seduce viewers are precisely those that Brouws aims to portray as inherently destructive to our culture.

The book’s three chapters—“The Highway Landscape,” “The Franchised Landscape” and “The Discarded Landscape”—are a clear indicator of the artist’s analytic agenda. They present the different themes the photographs analyze and critique: the disappearance of the vernacular, the spreading of homogeneous suburbs and corporations, and, finally, the decaying inner cities left behind. Empty shop windows, Levittowns, and boarded-up apartment buildings tell the story.

According to William L. Fox, the author of the first essay appearing in the afterword, the inner city is ruinous and local businesses are disappearing as a direct consequence of the spread of suburbia. As the tax base rushes to new localities in the hope of peace and quiet, they leave no incentive for investment in the core of the city. As America has slowly “[shifted] from a nation of citizens to a nation of consumers,” it follows that corporations such as McDonald’s and Wal-mart, represented in Brouws’s photographs from all around the United States, bulldoze the area around the suburbs to a dulling conformity of drive-ins and parking lots.

This analysis is arguably simplistic, but the fact remains that Brouws’s photographs testify to the uniformity of the landscape marred by highways, rest areas, and suburbs. Whether in New York, Ohio, or Oklahoma, all McDonalds’ restaurants incontestably look the same. Jack Kerouac may have wanted to be “on the road,” but had he lived till the ’90s, he would have quickly come to the realization that it was the same road, wherever he went.

This brings us to the question of travel, or the “myth of mobility,” as Fox and Brouws would have it: the alluring prospect of mobility the American Dream promotes is not necessarily upward mobility. The act of traveling does not guarantee something for the better. We romanticize the road, and yet increasingly, it holds only deindustrialized areas and highways that bypass the city. “If Americans now move almost every five years and seem to have no trouble abandoning one community for the next, a homogenized landscape (as now seen across the United States) would actually make a...transplantable skilled or unskilled employee feel right at home,” writes Brouws.

This transitory nature of American life is apparent in the speed with which derelict sites transform into franchised businesses before being abandoned once again. And yet there is a certain beauty in this constant metamorphosis of the landscape that both writer Fox and photographer Brouws disregard: the landscape is alive and changing from one year to the next, even if it is not necessarily “for the better.”

Brouws describes his approach as a blend of “documentary and interpretive,” an interesting combination which raises the question of how one could possibly go without the other. Where are the landmarks of the states he drives through? Where are the lakes, the coasts, the mountains and gorges that we identify with specific places? Does he omit these looming elements of the landscape purposefully, in order to prove his point?

In any case, Brouws certainly does not limit himself to the criticism of urban geography. A billboard advertising “Leave No Child Behind” comprises part of a “discarded landscape.” Photographer and social critic, Brouws ambitiously raises questions far beyond the scope of a generic tea-table photo book, leaving them upended and unanswered, as is the privilege of artists.