Photobook Review: Sons Of The Living by Bryan Schutmaat

Sons Of The Living is a photobook of epic landscapes from the American West. Minerals are taken from these landscapes, roads run through them, people live in them; sons of the living who are all made equal in these most hostile of environments.

Sons Of The Living is a book rich with references. It’s biblical, it’s cinematic, it’s photographic, it’s environmental, it’s political. It’s a book where the landscape is the dominant part of the narrative, larger than the people, the places, the economies that repeatedly arise throughout the book.

The landscape is that of the American West. It’s mountainous, it’s dry, it’s filled with plains, ravines, dying towns, and roads that thread through gorges transporting people and goods from one place to another.

In this landscape there are ash-like expanses of desert marked by tyre tracks, there are skid marks, decaying gas stations, pumpjacks and battered cars that are more homes than means of transport.

The oil industry marks the landscape in other words. It’s like a contemporary version of Timothy O’Sullivan’s Survey photographs. These were made in the 19th century to show what could be done with the land, to show how and where it could be developed, debased, exploited.

Move ahead 150 years and that debasement is apparent not in the landscapes of Sons Of The Living. Despite the roads that run through it, the industrial plants that have been built into it, the tyres that are dumped onto it, the land remains the same. It exists in geological time and we it is beyond our debasement. Long after the Anthropocene era has died its last choking, heat-stricken breath, these mountains, plains and gorges will continue to be.

Instead the debasement is apparent in the margins of life that still live there, in the attempts to fit a life of consumption, of plenty into these places where the climate, already harsh, becomes still less hospitable, where only a particular kind of being can survive the demands of existing in a world without water, crops, wages, and the accoutrements of consumption that we come to expect in the western world, and in the USA in particular.

The people in the book are those kinds of beings. They are people of the margins. Many Trespasser books feature people on the margins. They serve as conduits for a broader narrative. The struggle of life and climate is written into their faces. Some of these people are of these places. They are people who know (or once knew) how to live there, who have a folk memory of a time when peach trees grew in canyon beds. But most have come from other places. They stay in places meant to be passed through, living their lives in cars and decaying motels.

There’s a text that comes with the book.

I pull out my sleeping bag and lie down, time thickens. I doze and wake and doze again in the ooze of it all. I dream of brother. Sadness enlarges in me. What is it that I want? I want a spring that won't run dry. Pears bending the branches of the trees. A kind God and time that doesn't run out.

That adds to the narrative element of the book. You look at it and start wondering what it would be if it were a novel or a film. You project your visual library onto the book. It feels like the end-times of Tim Winton’s novel Juice mixed with Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood. If it were a film, it might be a combination of No Country For Old Men and Grapes Of Wrath. And if it were a singer, Woody Guthrie springs to mind.

There’s the constant question in Sons Of The Living of who the people are and where they come from, at the essential unhappiness and struggle projected in these images, a struggle that is part of a wider world, the world of the United States today, a land of misery and conflict.

There is an optimistic picture in the book, one in keeping with the survey aspect. It shows a verdant valley filled with water. A reservoir carved created to feed the body and the soul. But there’s no place for optimism in Sons Of The Living thank god. This is water that will be wasted, that leeches the life blood of rivers, that desiccates the environment. This is water for consumption, for casinos and golf courses, and backyard swimming pools. This is water that is being taken, not given. This is why the world of Sons Of The Living is as it is; desiccated, depleted, and altogether without hope.

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Sons Of The Living by Bryan Schutmaat is published by Trespasser Books

11,75x14,75 inches
188 pages
90 tritone plates on uncoated paper
Cloth cover and foil stamp text
Page edges painted black
Designed by Cody Haltom
Production management by Thomas Bollier

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Bryan Schutmaat is a photographer based in Austin, Texas whose work has been widely exhibited and published. He has won numerous awards, including a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, the Aperture Portfolio Prize, and an Aaron Siskind Fellowship. Bryan’s prints are held in many collections, such as Baltimore Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Pier 24 Photography, Rijksmuseum, and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. He co-founded the imprint, Trespasser.

Colin Pantall is a photographer, writer and lecturer based in Bath, England. His next online courses and in person workshops begin in January, 2025. More information here. Follow him on Instagram.