Exhibit Review

Jeff Brouws
Approaching Nowhere
Robert Mann Gallery, New York
September 6 through October 14, 2006

Catherine Opie
American Cities
Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York
September 9 through Oct. 14, 2006

The American landscape has been homogenized into tracts of modular housing and big box stores tied together by highways. Catherine Opie’s American Cities and Jeff Brouws’s Approaching Nowhere both respond to this loss of geographical identity.
Opie has set about defining the essential characteristic of five American Cities. She laments, “We have lost the original dream of what a city was with the proliferation of the building of suburbia throughout America.”1 Her search is for the remnants of unique identity that can inspire and provide a model for community. Brouws photographs the places in the United States that have lost their identity, the farmland turned into a Wal-Mart, the abandoned inner city. His photographs “…capture a more melancholic, alienated environment that speaks less of freedom or hope, and more about the failed expectations and promises of the American experience.” He photographs places that have been designated as on the way to somewhere else, places that bear the scars of globalization.

Opie’s images define the identity of five American cities with one essential, distinctive feature for each. New York is reduced to Wall Street, LA to its mini-malls. Chicago is represented by its architectural monuments at night. The black and white, panoramic images are grand and filled with nostalgia. Empty of any direct human presence, the lights of the city at night imply the concentration of people and ideas that make cities great. These images present a dream of a city, a place with no suffering, segregation, or poverty.

Brouws divides his work up into three categories: the highway landscape, the franchised landscape, and the discarded landscape. In the photographs, roads lead to more of the same, walls and facades create literal dead ends and images of ruined industrial-era structures are surrounded by empty lots. His photographs are of places no one specifically recognizes yet they seem familiar to everyone.

Compare any of Opie’s romantic, nocturnal images of Chicago to Brouws’s Wal-Mart, Indiana, 2006 also shot at night. Two-thirds of the square frame is empty, black, underexposed. The site is represented as a literal void. The building is inescapable; it is shown to have no doors or windows. Lights on the roof form lines of perspective indicating that this building is huge. The lights do not indicate presence as in the Opie photographs but instead serve the purpose of surveillance. They indicate an absence both of people and the trust of community.

Opie’s American Cities longs for the vitality of the shared space of the city. Idealized, each city becomes an icon of difference, a talisman against homogeneity but ultimately an illusion. Brouws’s Approaching Nowhere depicts without glamour the lonely, void that emerges from the destruction caused by the economic forces of globalization. Both Opie and Brouws use the built environment to create images that place difference, individuality and nuance in the past. While American Cities presents a nostalgic view of an American ideal, Approaching Nowhere depicts a devastated present.

1. Maura Reilly, “The Drive to Describe: An Interview with Catherine Opie,”
Art Journal (New York, New York), Summer, 2001.
2. Jeff Brouws, Approaching Nowhere, (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2006), 149.

published in Exposure, the journal of the Society for Photographic Education, Spring 2007