When Mark Brautigam returned to his home state of Wisconsin in 2000 after serving in the Marines in San Diego, he didn’t know what to do. None of the jobs he’d been considering appealed to him. He was thinking about going back to school. “When I got back, I was used to that grand, epic California landscape, and it was so foreign to me. I had this new appreciation for a subtler, quieter sort of place like Wisconsin,” Brautigam said.
Introducing editorial assistant Sarah Stankey as she shares a recent interview she conducted with Mark Brantigam… In October, I was met with the great opportunity to work with Aline and LENSCRATCH. Currently, I am a senior photography student at the Mil
A great benefit to me in doing this project was to get away from the constant contact that we have these days. I enjoy being out in more rural areas and enjoying the solitude. So I think there are many images without people directly in them just by the nature of photographing in places where there were a lot less people than I’m used to. I actually approached the portraits in much the same way that I approached the landscapes. Even though I was photographing a person, I was always just as interested in capturing the environment that person was in. Similarly, when making a landscape photograph I was attracted more to landscapes that bore the mark of some sort of human presence or activity.
