Bill Leigh Brewer

Born in California, Bill makes his home in the California high desert. Photography has taken him from Los Angeles to New York, as well as Malaysia, Nova Scotia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Europe, and his primary focus, the American Southwest.

He received a graduate degree from USC. He taught photography at Long Beach City College, where he is a member their Photography Advisory Committee. 

Bill is a recipient of a Donaldson Trust Fellowship, a one-month residency at the Vermont Studio Center. He was named the Epson International Pano Photographer of the Year in 2010.

Bill recently published his first book, Proof of Life. Designed by Tony Pinto, the book documents Bill’s experience of the Southwest landscape and the marks people leave on it.

Selected Exhibitions

  • Salton Sea Museum - Curated by Deborah Martin

  • Palm Springs Art Museum

  • The Main Museum, Los Angeles

  • Oculus Clamantis in Deserto: Splendor and Disaster in the California Outback - Curated by Peter Frank - Palm Springs Fine Art Fair 

  • Marks Center for the Arts, College of the Desert - Solo Show

  • 29 Palms Art Gallery - Solo Show

  • Santa Monica College - Solo Show

  • Magic and Realism - Official Month of Photography in L.A. Two Person Exhibition

  • Analogue Project - Official Month of Photography in L.A. Exhibition

  • Orange County Center for Contemporary Art

  • SoHo Gallery, Los Angeles

  • 23rd Street USC Gallery, Los Angeles - Solo Exhibition

  • AIM Gallery, Los Angeles

  • I-5 Gallery, Los Angeles - Cuba - Two Person Exhibition

  • Yucca Valley Art Gallery - Desert Icons

  • Ren Gallery, Los Angeles

  • Coachella Valley Art Center - Desert Island - Curated by Epicenter Projects

  • Digital Photography Review/David Alexander Willis - Featured Artist

Artist Statment

In the summer of 1981 I took a road trip, shooting hundreds of pictures with my Canon AE-1 and Kodachrome 25. But more importantly, throughout the trip I listened to The Clash. I'd finished my sixth year of teaching middle school and I wasn't happy. The lyrics to Clampdown resonated:

Voices in your head are calling
Stop wasting your time there’s nothing coming
Only a fool would think someone could save you

The men in the factory are old and cunning
You don't owe nothing, so boy get running
It’s the best years of your life they want to steal

I returned home, quit teaching, and enrolled in the photography program at Long Beach City College (LBCC). I didn't know it then, but the solo road trip would become my artist practice. 

LBCC may have been a no-frills vocational program, but it gave me a rock-solid technical foundation and introduced me to artists like Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Frank, Ralph Gibson, and Diane Arbus. Meanwhile, frequent visits to Joshua Tree National Park would develop into a passion for the desert landscape that would sustain me for the next forty years. 

It was during my time at LBCC that I first learned about new topographics, a recent development in landscape photography. In 1975, New Topographics: Photographs of a Man Altered Landscape, a group show at the George Eastman House in Rochester, crystalized the movement away from epic subject matter and romantic depictions of nature by artists like Ansel Adams. 

In 1932, Adams had rejected the then-current fashion in photography, pictorialism, with its soft focus emulation of paintings. He replaced it with straight photography which featured sharp focus throughout the image with rigid control and manipulation of the tonal range. Adams and other photographers like Edward Weston and Imogen Cunningham, who formed the f/64 group, became the standard bearers for what was considered the modern photographic representation of the landscape. 

But by the 1970s, the new topographic artists rejected the carefully composed, technically manipulated, traditionally beautiful landscapes of the straight photographers. Instead they encouraged an “anonymity of style”; William Jenkins, who curated the original New Topographics show, said, "The pictures were stripped of any artistic frills and reduced to an essentially topographic state, conveying substantial amounts of visual information but eschewing entirely the aspects of beauty, emotion and opinion…[they showed] rigorous purity, deadpan humor and a casual disregard for the importance of the images.” The hand of the artist was meant to be invisible. 

Fresh out of school, I was making images that looked like my early heroes. Overlaying that were my frequent road trips into the deserts of the American Southwest. It’s been a journey and an awakening to find myself increasingly influenced by the new topographic aesthetic. It’s not like the old influences go away completely, it’s just that the mix changes. 

It took some time for me to process the aesthetic and the intentions of the new topographic artists. I grew to accept and welcome the non-epic subject matter and man-altered landscapes. But I don’t reject beauty and emotion, nor do I think the hand of the artist is invisible in my work. I will shoot landscapes for pure aesthetic beauty, but I see more narrative interest, as well as beauty, when I look at the marks people leave. That content might be interesting historically or politically — my undergraduate degree in history is an influence here — but I primarily find subjects that resonate on an emotional, yet aesthetic level. That feeling is what I seek to capture. 

As an artist, I embrace the photomechanical-ness of my chosen medium, photography. I love what I call the glorious rendering of detail. Since 1975, the technical capabilities of photography have changed radically, especially since the advent of digital photography. Dynamic range, the ability to hold detail in highlights and shadows, is vastly improved compared to film. Cameras were always light-gathering machines, but ever more so in the digital age. The work I do at night would have been very difficult or even impossible in the days of film photography. Likewise for the extended panoramic shots that I stitch together digitally. Much of what I do now in my creative practice was unheard of when I embarked on this journey in the 1980s. 

All this leads to my goal, to create images that document my experience of a place and a time, to somehow convey the feeling of that unique moment.