Bryan Schutmaat © Abandoned Homestead, Red Mountain Mining District, Colorado, 2011
By happy coincidence I discovered the work of Bryan Schutmaat, and his poetic series: “Grays the Mountain Sends”.
In “Grays the Mountain Sends”, Schutmaat skillfully documents the rugged landscapes and people of the great American West. The images describe a series of mining sites and small, hardscrabble mountain towns. Also portrayed are the people who have worked in them, built them, and a few younger people who might—or might not—be looking for a way out of them.
Bryan Schutmaat ©
I love these landscapes. The beautiful sad emptiness of abandoned places. Look at the light and the colors, amazing! Someone said Schutmaat was inspired by the poetry of Richard Hugo, it seems plausible. But there is definitively also a very personal & original nerve in these pictures.
Bryan Schutmaat’s work will be on show at the Aperture Foundation NY this autumn, those of us hanging out in different neighborhoods will have to go online to find out more about his work.
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Bryan Schutmaat was born in 1983 in Houston, where he later completed a BA in history at the University of Houston. He also received an MFA in photography from the Hartford Art School in Connecticut.
sub rosa 
I have friends who are trapped high on one of these mountains…above the Colorado flood zone, but cut off from town, etc. Eerie and powerful places still exist in the American west. Great photos!
I’ve heard there is a terrible situation in Colorado. Scaring, really – how powerless we are in some situations!