Jeff Brouws
Jeff Brouws (born 1955) is an American documentary photographer based in Upstate New York. He was born in San Francisco, California.
Over the past decades, Brouws has photographed the American landscape to explore its history and social changes. His subjects include nuclear weapons and their legacy, roadside and commercial architecture, suburbs, inner cities, post-industrial cities in the Northeast, and the railroad world.
He works in many styles, from single images to groups that compare similar subjects. He often focuses on TOADS—temporary, obsolete, derelict, abandoned sites—and calls his work "visual anthropology." He was inspired by New Topographics photographers and by Ed Ruscha and other photographers and writers who study how places are built and lived in.
In 1992 he self-published Twentysix Abandoned Gasoline Stations as a tribute to Ruscha.
His other books include Highway: America’s Endless Dream (1997); Inside The Live Reptile Tent: The Twilight World of the Carnival Midway (2001); Readymades: American Roadside Artifacts (2003); and Approaching Nowhere (2006). He edited Various Small Books: Referencing the Various Small Books of Ed Ruscha (2013). He has also produced several railroad photography books featuring other photographers: Starlight On The Rails (1999); A Passion for Trains: The Railroad Photography of Richard Steinheimer (2004); The Call of Trains: Railroad Photographs by Jim Shaughnessy (2008); Some Vernacular Railroad Photographs (2013).
His work has appeared in Harper’s, The New Yorker, and The New York Times Magazine. He has lectured at many institutions, including Syracuse University, Texas State University, School of Visual Arts, Kenyon College, Williams College, and Vassar College.
Brouws has had more than 25 solo exhibitions and many group shows. His Ed Ruscha: Books & Co. project was shown at the Gagosian Gallery in New York and at the Brandhorst Museum in Munich in 2013.
His photographs are in major public collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Fogg Museum, Princeton University Art Museum, the Henry Art Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the J. Paul Getty Museum (nine prints).
He has received awards from the Railway and Locomotive Historical Society, including the George and Constance Hilton Book Award (2005) for A Passion for Trains and the John H. White Fellowship (2013) for research on southern railroad photography.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 18:11 (CET).