Readymades: American Roadside Artifacts

by Jeff Brouws

Jeff Brouws has crisscrossed the country for two decades, documenting an America that is at once quintessential and peculiar. Readymades is a quirky, multi-layered catalog of this ascendant... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0811836770
• ISBN13: 9780811836777
• Release Date: February 2003
• Publisher: Chronicle Books
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 1.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 2.0" x 6.0" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Another wonder from Jeff Brouws

This is a testimony. A book that maybe can't be done anymore. A reminder of a lost identity among franchise. A poem to the past.

Worn surfaces of America.

Yet another roadie book but `Readymades' is a cut above the usual photographic selection of what can be seen along the nation's back roads. For a start the book is landscape, just the right shape for images that are basically horizontal. Secondly the photos are divided into sections rather than loosely hung together by state or date order. Thirdly the choice of material is refreshing, for example, tract housing, freight cars, trailers or storage units (no kidding). This is Jeff Brouws second road book, his first, the excellent `Highway: America's Endless Dream', was more the traditional photographic road book, a mixture of everything plus a selection of interesting black and white images from the thirties and forties. I like the formal arrangement of `Readymades'. By having each of the eleven chapters devoted to a particular theme he "presents the subject in the most factual terms possible" as Diana Gaston says in her intro. The chapters are tract housing, signs, abandoned drive-ins, farms, pickups, abandoned gas stations, boxcars, signs two, trailers, bowling and finally storage units. Partially painted pickup trucks are just that, twenty-five of them are all taken side on and nicely framed within the image area. Twenty-six abandoned gas stations (in black and white) are one to a page and just the sort of thing Robert Frank would have stopped his car for back in the fifties. Freight cars, again one to a page and neatly framed, are an amazing colored selection of various shades of rust and railroad livery. Perhaps the most unusual chapter is storage units, hardly the sort of thing to capture the creative eye but here they are, eighteen shots including a stunning one taken in West Virginia in 2001 showing three power station cooling towers in the distance, the storage units in the middle and a parking lot in the foreground. The photos of these units remind me of Lewis Baltz and his photos of the industrial parks in Irvine, CA, simple oblongs just placed in the landscape. `Readymades' is a refreshing look and presentation of the vernacular everyday and I think it might well turn out to be a classic photo book of the decade. ***FOR AN INSIDE LOOK click 'customer images' under the cover.