Trent Davis Bailey: Every Photographer Hits The Wrong Notes Before Finding Their Voice, E124

Trent Davis Bailey spent 7 years photographing a remote farming valley in Colorado, convinced he was making documentary work. He wasn't. The pictures knew before he did: he was searching for the family he'd lost to a twenty-year estrangement, and by the end of The North Fork he had found his aunt, his cousins, and the woman who became his wife. Then he turned the camera toward something far harder. His new photobook Son Pictures, published by Chose Commune, reckons with the crash of United Flight 232, the disaster that killed his mother when he was 3 years old, through his own photographs, family snapshots, newspaper archives, and the eerily premonitory artworks his mother made as a girl, including a drawing of a plane falling from the sky, made decades before she boarded one.
This is a conversation for any photographer who has ever suspected their work is about something they haven't admitted yet. We follow how a photography project becomes a mirror, how a photobook gets edited and sequenced when your heart is too close to the pictures, and how grief, memory and image-making feed each other over a decade of work.
Other things we discussed:
Being tied to a tree for his first ever photographs, and why he's glad the negatives were destroyed
The camera as a passport for a shy kid, and photography as a search for belonging
Why he hides many of his subjects' faces, and the 4-foot constraint that shaped The North Fork
Editing 60 pictures down to 46 with Trespasser, and handing his grief to the right publisher
Rebecca Solnit's essay, walking as a way of seeing, and why "capture" is the wrong word for photography
Watching a Hollywood reenactment of the crash at 7 years old, and how cinema colonises memory
Becoming a father, and the New York Times op-ed that revealed what Son Pictures was really about
Humor as an antidote to grief, and protecting play inside the heaviest work
Robert Adams, reusing photographs across books, and what follows a decade-long project
Find Trent’s work here:
https://trentdavisbailey.com
https://www.instagram.com/trentdavisbailey/
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