Like many Americans who grew up during the spread of sprawl - with its predictable landscape of housing developments, shopping malls, interstate highways and big-box construction - acclaimed photographer Jeff Brouws is drawn to places that still embody the vernacular past as well as to those that starkly portray the soulless, franchised American landscape. This collection of evocative images of buildings and places seen from the American road began as a cultural geography of Main Streets and became a visual critique of the myth of upward mobility that created this car-centred, paved-over universe. Some images look outward to the edges of suburbia where sprawl is encroaching upon nature. Others turn inward, documenting the devastated inner cities. All of them reflect the complex beauty and desolation of visual life in America today.

About the Author

JEFF BROUWS is the photographer of Highway and Readymades, and recently edited A Passion for Trains: The Railroad World of Richard Steinheimer (ISBN 978 0 393 05743 0). Author Web site: www.jeffbrouws.com