born November 3, 1983) is an American photographer based in Texas. His work focuses on landscape, portraiture, and the social and environmental realities of rural and post-industrial communities in the United States.

Life and Work

Schutmaat was born in Houston, Texas, in 1983. He received a Master of Fine Arts in photography from the University of Hartford in 2012. His work is held in the collections of major institutions, including the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Hood Museum of Art, the Middlebury College Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

His first book, Grays the Mountain Sends (2013), portrays mountain towns and former mining communities in the American West through a combination of portraits and landscapes. The project was inspired by the poetry of Richard Hugo and photographed in color using a large-format 4×5 view camera. The book received the Aperture Foundation Portfolio Prize and established Schutmaat as a significant voice in contemporary American photography.

Islands of the Blest (2014) departs from original photography and instead presents a curated selection of historic images of the American West dating from the 1870s to the 1970s. The photographs were sourced by Schutmaat and Ashlyn Davis from the archives of the Library of Congress and the United States Geological Survey.

Good Goddamn (2017), photographed over the course of several days, documents a friend from rural Texas during the final days before his incarceration. The book marked the first publication of Trespasser, a Texas-based art book publisher co-founded by Schutmaat with Matthew Genitempo and Cody Haltom.

Created during the COVID-19 pandemic, County Road (2023) offers a quiet, intimate examination of the Texas landscape and small towns closer to Schutmaat’s home. Shot in black and white with a small handheld camera, the work traces rural routes between Austin, where he lives, and Leon County, the location of his family’s farm.

Sons of the Living (2024) returns to the deserts of the American West, examining the relationship between land and people along highways and remote regions. Photographed with a 4×5 camera, the project combines portraits and landscapes to address themes of endurance amid environmental decline, economic dispossession, and social uncertainty.

Reference List

Bryan Schutmaat. (n.d.). Wikipedia. Retrieved January 19, 2026, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bryan_Schutmaat