Jeff Brouws

It's been a busy 10 days, between Philadelphia, NYC and Boston, but I wanted to take time to highlight the work of Jeff Brouws, an established photographer represented by esteemed galleries such as the Robert Klein Gallery in Boston as well as the Robert Mann gallery in New York. Jeff seems to blend the visual and conceptual sides of photography beautifully. His newer series, Proximity, uses triptychs to highlight the dichotomy that is observed in North Dakota between a seemingly simple, romantic version of American rural life and the nuclear missile silos that lie only miles from those places. As Mark Rawlinson puts it in his essay titled Out of Sight, Out of Mind, the Proximity triptychs "gather together the tick-tock of everyday life—the work of the grain elevator, the life of the corner convenience store—with the Minuteman ICBM silos. Abutted in this way, the disjunction between one and the other, long forgotten, becomes chillingly apparent: Out of sight, is out of mind". This newer work falls in line with Jeff's older series, After Trinity, which contains images of the site where the first atomic bomb was detonated. Jeff's work is structurally beautiful and the work maintains an ever present meaning. For achieving this balance alone, I admire Jeff's images. Also, blogger has made it incredibly dificult to upload a high quality version of the triptych below, so please check out Jeff's site as well.

Trinity Site 1, Location of First Atomic Bomb Detonation, Alamogordgo, New Mexico, 1987

All images are exclusively copyrighted by Jeff Brouws