Grays The Mountain Sends

First edition of Grays The Mountain Sends by Bryan Schutmaat (2012).

First impression

Large format softcover with metal spine in fine condition

Signed by Schutmaat to title page

Some very minor wear to extremities of boards

Pages clean, binding firm

About

In Grays the Mountain Sends, Schutmaat skillfully documents the rugged landscapes and people of the great American West. The images describe a series of mining sites and small, hardscrabble mountain towns. Also portrayed are the people who have worked in them, built them, and a few younger people who might—or might not—be looking for a way out of them. It’s this balance between the clearly ravaged land and equally devastated faces, with a few moments of youth, beauty, and the last glimmer of promises never truly fulfilled, that elevates Schutmaat’s work. His photographs, carefully controlled in both palette and structure, have a true regional twang. They evoke the wear and tear perpetrated on the land, as well as on the psyche of people who live there, with scant separation in one’s sense of the individuals and one’s sense of the place.