Reading about Bryan Schutmaat this week was super interesting, as he mentioned how he enjoyed working with people and places that he had no connection to. He claims that lack of connection is extremely liberating, something that I agree with. While it was scary doing portrait photography in Sweden and Germany, it was extremely liberating to work with people and places that I had no connection to. No real knowledge about. 

I also found his reasoning for only photographing men in the series to be interesting. 

“Ultimately I feel this work is about the patriarchs of the American West and how we’ve reckoned with the outcome of imposing a very male-driven doctrine upon the bulk of a continent’s wilderness; it’s about the hopes, efforts, and failures of our fathers, not so much our mothers. And in some ways, I think I attempted to make portraits of my own father through these guys, reflecting on a father/son generational narrative and how that relates to the lore of the American dream.”

I find it interesting that while he shares why he wants to photograph men, he doesn’t really ever explain why women didn’t fit the narrative of his series. All he ever said was that they didn’t fit the narrative. I believe that while the series is interesting, Schutmaat left a lot of the story out of his series by refusing to include women in it. If he was against including them in the same series, he could have also released a partner series of photographs detailing mostly women.