Juxtapoz Magazine – Bryan Schutmaat’s Highway Drifters

“Photographed in the American Southwest, this body of work includes intimate portraits of travelers—mostly hitchhikers and highway drifters who dwell along the interstate system—as well as landscapes and still life photos that reflect a country in peril. Amidst the ravages of environmental decline, economic dispossession, and societal neglect, I’m struck by the extraordinary human capacity for endurance. I want to tell the ongoing story of the United States—a mythic, hallowed, beautiful, and broken land—where people are often pushed toward the margins of despair, yet many still carry on.