187 - Bryan Schutmaat
Bryan Schutmaat is an American 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. With his friend and fellow photographer Matthew Genitempo, he co-founded the imprint, Trespasser.
On episode 187, Bryan discusses, among other things:
- How Grays The Mountain Sends was influenced by poet Richard Hugo and the landscape of Montana and the American west.
- The connection between the state a person is from and the sterotype of what that means
- Why the American west ‘breaks his heart’
- How his dad shaped his view of the working class
- Finding the commonalities between people and place
- Good Goddamn and the freedom of switching to 35mm from large format
- The close relationship between photography and poetry
- Punk rock ethos as applied to Trespasser
- His experience of the Hertford MFA program
- The pros and cons of talking about your work as an artist
- Vessels
- NFTs
Referenced:
- Richard Hugo
- Wallace Stegna
- Geoff Dyer
- The 25th Hour
- Townes van Zandt
- Willie Nelson
- Nelson Chan
- Mike Mills
- Spike Jonze
- Minor Threat
- Salad Days (documentary)
- Matthew Genitempo
- John Cassavettes
- Five Easy Pieces
- J Carrier
- Tim Carpenter
- Carl Wooley
- Robert Lyons
- Mary Fry
- Alec Soth
- Justine Kurland
- Lois Connor
- Robert Adams
- Ingmar Bergman
- Nomadland
- The Thin Red Line
- Saving Private Ryan
- The Grapes of Wrath
- Pablo Cabado
- Leon Bridges
- Abigail Varney
“I think in this new space of iPhones and NFTs - I’m looking down at my iPhone right now - that’s just an undignied way to look at photographs you’ve put a lot of time and effort into. So the pictures on my website of installation shots or of books are just to remind people that what you’re looking at on screen is a very compromised version of what these pictures oughta be… it’s basically telling the viewer that, if you can, I would like this website to be a stepping stone to experience the book or the exhibition. It’s just sort of attempting to remind people that prints and physical tactile things matter in this digital age. So I don’t want to see that lost.”