Bryan Schutmaat photographed a door to eternity

Just to get straight to the point: this building is pretending. did as if, I should actually say – the moment Bryan Schutmaat (1983) photographed it, it already showed its true nature. It could no longer pass for a brick house. Through the cracks in the false masonry, the wooden planks it had been built with were already clearly visible.

If you were a tornado, then shattering such a wooden house did not cost you the slightest effort. If you were The Big Bad Wolf, blowing once was enough.

No idea who or what passed the house, but it was destructive. The building is a wreck. The door frame is out of plumb. The plinth rises as if it had been pulled with tremendous force. If the house were a tooth to pull, the oral surgeon would mutter as he went along: well, I won’t have to go to the gym anymore. But the house is still standing, more or less.

Schutmaat photographed it sometime in 2020. He found it on one of the country roads between Austin (Texas), where he lives, and Leon County, where his family farm is located, and where he often stayed in his youth. Schutmaat became known for portraits of hitchhikers and people he met on makeshift campsites, but in the covid time he shifted his gaze to his native soil. A selection of this work now hangs at Galerie Wouter van Leeuwen in Amsterdam.

It illustrates nicely what kind of photographer Schutmaat is: one who is first and foremost interested in time, its destructive power, how he leaves traces in faces, buildings, landscapes. The ruin finds in him a loving eye. Some of his photos evoke those of the men and women of the Farm Security Administration (Evans, Lange, etc.), and not just because Schutmaat works in moody black and white. It is mainly the things in his photos (roads, facades, vagabonds) that make them look like variations on that canonical work from the 1930s.

It is therefore not surprising that Schutmaat’s door photo opens another door: that of memory. He evokes memories of other doors, older doors, doors that have now been closed forever. Schutmaat’s door doesn’t even resemble the doors of the photographer he is most often compared to, Walker Evans. After all, Evans’ doors are usually closed. Rather, it leads to the photographed doors of the man who showed Evans the way: Paul Strand. For example, he is reminiscent of the open shop door that Strand photographed in Vermont. For Strand, that weathered door came close to a person. Schutmaat’s door is also a person, although that person is on the verge of death.

When I stepped right on top of it again, I saw something I’d overlooked before, something important. Among the rubble in the darkness of the (living?) room is a square structure from which toys hang – you can see little else in it than a baby playpen.

Was there a child in there when the house collapsed? Did someone come to the rescue?

Anyway, that box gives a macabre load to Schutmaat’s photo. It makes it the photographic equivalent of Hemingway’s ultra-short story: ‘For sale, baby shoes, not worn.’ It also puts the door itself in a different light. This immediately takes on the meaning that doors traditionally often had in poetry and paintings: that of a portal between the living and the dead. Whoever crosses the threshold exchanges the temporal for the eternal. Or is that an open door?