His series All The Grays the Mountains Send is about life in small towns in the western United States. My interpretation was that the shots had an air of resignation to them - like the people in them were saying, "I'm here, this is my life, and ?....." The faces of the people are deeply lined and the landscapes aren't necessarily just about nature.
I think this is a great portrait because it tells a whole story, it's not just a picture of some old guy sitting in an old truck. It looks like this gentleman combed his hair before he was immortalized by Mr. Schutmaat. Everything in this man's world is dried out and dusty and not just gray, but actually mostly shades of desert brown. At this moment though, there is only this man and this photographer.
A great portrait makes me want to know more about someone. It isn't an image like a school picture, it has depth. I would like to know how this man got here - in the middle of nowhere. What does he do here? I also think a good portrait says something about the person taking it. That person hopefully took a little time to consider what they wanted to see when they checked their final product.
For me, a landscape should be a shot of something beautiful and something that brings me a serene feeling. I realize that some landscapes are not nice to look at and are thought provoking (such as Schutmaat's shot of the cemetery in this series), but those are not pictures I like to look at routinely. Most landscapes have been shot thousands of times, so it takes a different angle or a different shadow position to make the same landscape really special. This picture, with the road cut into the mountain and the striations that are visible in the rock, is one that I like a lot. It is a good representation of the starkness of the environment Schutmaat is portraying.
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