Brouws, using myriad photographic approaches—from narrative stand-alone images to groupings of typologies—has spent the last 27 years visually exploring the American cultural landscape from a historical and socio-economic perspective.
With an affinity for what cultural geographers classify as TOADS (temporary, obsolete, derelict, abandoned sites) Brouws's practice involves what he refers to as "visual anthropology."
Initially inspired by New Topographic photographers like Robert Adams, Joe Deal and Lewis Baltz, he also counts the photography of Walker Evans, Camillo Jose Vergara, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Ed Ruscha, Mark Ruwedel, and Allan Sekula as important touchstones.
Since the early 1990s his work has also been intellectually informed by the writings of cultural geographers, historians and social critics like J.B. Jackson, John Stilgoe, Dolores Hayden, Leo Marx and Mike Davis.
He has had several other books published of his own work including Highway: America's Endless Dream (1997); Inside The Live Reptile Tent: The Twilight World of the Carnival Midway (2001); Readymades: American Roadside Artifacts (2003); and Approaching Nowhere (2006).