"Since the 1950s, suburbs have represented what adulthood is supposed to look like for Americans: a spacious house, enough green space to raise a family, and a refuge from the bustle of a nearby metropolis. But that might be changing as Americans are moving back to cities in a historical reverse of decades-old trends. . . . Just before the bubble burst in 2008, photographer Andrew Borowiec traveled to Ohio, the Midwestern heartland where national elections are determined and new fast-food products are tested, to capture this one-time American ideal—and the prefabricated bluegrass lawns and "lifestyle centers" (strip malls) it had become. Borowiec's wry photos in his book, The New Heartland: Looking for the American Dream, offers one explanation for why a generation soured on the old suburbs."
—Politico

"Andrew Borowiec's The New Heartland explores the uncharted terrain of an American landscape as it is being made and remade. Forty years after Robert Adams made photographic history by documenting the incessant march of development progress with square, black-and-white photographs of tract homes under construction and parking lots being paved, Borowiec brings color to his pictures of the manicured lawns, empty shopping centers, and plastic facades of an American Dream gone stale. Poignant, thought-provoking, and melancholic, The New Heartland vividly captures a defining moment of—what shall we call it?—the End of the American Century."
—Steven Hoelscher, Professor of American Studies and Geography and Faculty Curator of Photography, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin, and editor of Reading Magnum: A Visual Archive of the Modern World

"Andrew Borowiec's photographs take stock of contemporary life in America's heartland and explore how the way people shape their surroundings expresses our prevailing social and environmental values. The specificity of Borowiec's work reveals a sweet, irrefutable humanity that connects what we see with things we have experienced for ourselves and insists that these pictures and the trends they describe belong, somehow, to all of us.
"The New Heartland recalls other notable books in the history of photography: Robert Adams's The New West (1973), Walker Evans's American Photographs (1938), and the four-volume The Work of Atget (1981–1985) by John Szarkowski and Maria Morris Hambourg. These books wrestle with dichotomies of myth and reality, beauty and ugliness, gross social trends and the needs of ordinary people.
"The affinity among Borowiec, Adams, Evans, and Atget rests on those photographers' shared faith that simple facts of how things look, when stated clearly and economically in photographs, possess unique poetic power. The New Heartland contributes to this tradition of careful looking with photographs of intelligence and wit."
—Eric Paddock, Curator of Photography, Denver Art Museum, and author of Robert Benjamin: Notes from a Quiet Life