Jeff Brouws: Archives of Smoke and Concrete, on view at Robert Mann Gallery from October 29 to December 12, 2026, showcases the photographer's landmark series documenting the architectural remnants of America's railroad history, featured in his critically acclaimed book Silent Monoliths: The Coaling Tower Project, published by MIT Press in February 2026. Acting as a visual anthropologist, Jeff Brouws utilizes a precise, deadpan typological approach to capture these industrial monuments left behind by technological shifts across the United States. The exhibition presents large black-and-white photographs of coal towers alongside a grid of color works from Brouws' series Signs Without Signification, examining the skeletal, stripped frameworks of defunct commercial signage.
Between 1907 and 1956, the country's rapidly growing railway industry constructed hundreds of massive reinforced-concrete structures designed to hold several hundred tons of coal used to fuel steam locomotives. As the industry transitioned from steam to diesel throughout the 1950s, these behemoth structures eventually became obsolete. Although some were torn down, many have remained in place, acting as abandoned witnesses to the rise and fall of American railroading. Over five years and covering more than 20,000 miles, Brouws systematically documented these dormant, sculptural artifacts, photographing each towering structure under flat, overcast light. He presents these silent monoliths as imposing, monumental testaments to the perplexing contradictions of modern industrialization. Just over one hundred coaling towers still stand on the continent, each originally built for the same simple purpose—to drop coal into steam locomotives.
Brouws' Coaling Tower Project is an extension of his over 35-year career chronicling the shifting, multifaceted commercial and industrial topography of the American cultural landscape, using his camera to construct rigorous photographic typologies and deliberate narrative frameworks. His practice has investigated the socio-spatial and socio-economic remnants of mid-century idealism and subsequent late-stage capitalism, with subjects ranging from the interstate highway system and corporate sprawl to post-industrial urban decay. His work directly engages in a critical dialogue with the New Topographics movement, which reframed the American landscape by focusing on man-altered spaces rather than pristine nature. Brouws also builds upon the pioneering strategies of forebears like Ed Ruscha and Bernd and Hilla Becher, preserving the ephemeral iconography of the American built environment. Born in San Francisco in 1955 and now based in Stanfordville, New York, Brouws has exhibited widely, with work in collections including Harvard's Fogg Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Princeton University Art Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. By capturing sites of obsolescence and neglect, the spaces he photographs become melancholic meditations on an ever-changing, ever-evolving national identity.
Image: Coaling Tower No. 8a, Looking North, Gilman, Illinois, 2014 © Jeff Brouws, courtesy of the Robert Mann Gallery
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