Like many who grew up during the spread of sprawl - with its predictable landscape of housing developments, interstate highways, and big-box construction - acclaimed photographer Jeff Brouws is intrigued by places that still show signs of the vernacular past. What began as cultural geography of Main Streets became a visual critique of the myth of upward mobility that created this car-centered, paved-over universe. Combining a minimal, bleak beauty with understated social commentary, these evocative color photographs seek a deeper meaning behind the cycle of construction, decay, decline and renewal.

Brouws bears witness to the new big-box, "superstore" construction that eradicates valuable farmland in the Midwest. He examines the once vibrant, now abandoned central business districts in rust-belt cities like Buffalo, New York, or Gary, Indiana. On Chicago's south side, high-rise towers stand in silent testimony to the failure of public housing erected during the Great Society era of the 1960s. Driving east, we encounter a franchised landscape of corporate logos that clutter the skyways off Interstate 90, indiscriminately infiltrating our horizons.

APPROACHING NOWHERE is a moving meditation on the loss of place and texture in the contemporary American landscape. Brouws' luminous images elegantly capture the complex, surprising beauty and desolation of visual life in our time, as seen from the American road. The potency of the work reflects both Brouws' perceptive vision of the country's changing face and his concern for the shifting shape of its soul.

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 found art in the landscape: partially painted pickup trucks, storage units, vibrant-hued tract homes, unique signage, and abandoned drive-in movie theaters all fall under the photographer's gaze. Provocative essays by leading writers and cultural commentators such as Luc Sante, DJ Waldie, M. Mark, Diana Gaston, Bruce Caron, and Phil Patton are juxtaposed with these images that seek beauty, uniqueness and meaning in the mundane and overlooked.

HIGHWAY is a collection of one-hundred full-color images by photographer Jeff Brouws - the result of years of cross-country travel along America's secondary routes in search of disappearing roadside culture. Presented alongside thirty-seven black and white images by Depression-era photographers Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange and others, Brouws' work provides a contemporary continuation of an important documentary aesthetic. Accompanying the photographs are essays by cultural historians Phil Patton and Bernd Polster.

INSIDE THE LIVE REPTILE TENT captures the half-experienced, half-remembered landscape of the American carnival midway in eighty color photographs. Temporary architecture, gravity defying amusement rides, brightly colored booths, the beseeching barkers - all are preserved by Brouws' lens in the perpetual twilight of the midway. Cultural historian Bruce Caron provides a lively text to accompany the photographs.