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

reflect back at you, why you're actually making it." This is Trent Davis Bailey, photographer author of The North Fork and the maker of Sun Pictures, a deeply personal book, and reckoning with one of the most traumatic parts of his life,

“and a loss that he was too young to remember. He spent years on these projects,”

before he understood what they were truly about. I was trying to convince myself that I was negating this documentary word about a farming community. You know, this work is about something else that I was looking for my family, and I didn't want to admit that, and in the end I ended up meeting my wife that I knew wearing something in the process of making the pictures. This conversation is about what a camera can hold that memory cannot,

grief, family, and the pictures that lead you home. So if you've ever thought yourself about why you make your own work or haven't quite found a clear voice yet, this one is for you, because Trent spent years chasing the wrong reason before the pictures showed him the real one. "My mom and 11 others died, and in many ways I ignored my grief until I was in adults, and I felt I was in this safe place to do so. I don't feel like I know her, or I have the

greater sense of her, maybe necessarily than when I started the project, why would you make the work if you already knew what you were going to do?" "Okay, Trent, welcome to the Boon podcast. It's a great to have you here. Thanks for having me, Matt." "Where do we start? I have been a fan for a very long time. I've since I stumbled

“upon North fork, which published by Treasper, so I think. I can't even remember how I found it,”

but maybe just through normal media distribution, but yeah, being a fan of a while, so I do want to talk about that as well as the new book coming up, but before we continue and for those that may not know you, I know you a little bit, mostly through research we've had conversations before, and I understand that the camera and photography has been such an integral part of you since you were a boy. So I'm interested to hear how the camera has been

kind of tethered to you since you were such a young lad, and it kind of found you and never really

let go, I guess. I'm wanting to understand if you know know why and what kind of drew you really into the art of photography at such a young age." "Wow, I wish I had a quick and easy answer for you there, but yeah, I can say that I picked up my first camera when I was about 12 years old, but prior to that, it had a lot of fun with just point to your cameras in the 90s disposable cameras of the plastic lens and getting those back from the one-hour

photo lab. Like many families we had point to cameras as well, which I discovered is part of

a recent project, but we'll get to that later. Essentially the first time that I got interested

in photography, I've shared this story a couple times before, but I'll share it again here for listeners who haven't heard it. My older brother was a freshman in high school and had been assigned by his art teacher to take pictures of somehow included a rope, which is very vague, but in his own teenage

“way, I think she thought it would be fun to see about tying up his little brother.”

I'm like a bondage wave, but I'm gonna constrain you and hold you down and take these pictures more like, hey, how about I tell you the tree in the backyard, which is what he did. We did that made a few pictures there, and then I think you shot a roll of film and he goes inside and leaves you there for five minutes. I remember thinking, "Wow, the camera is a powerful tool because I was just willing to let somebody tie me to a tree to make art using a camera."

And he also, we had this nice brotherly relationship, but we had never interacted in this

collaborative way before, so the camera enabled that. In enabled us as teenage brothers or I wasn't

our own reality and our own relationship, but there was space for the imagination and the camera

enabled that. And so that was really useful. He comes back out untiesely from the tree and he's like, "What do you think about getting on the top of dad's old Toyota Land Cruiser?" And he's like, "You're trying to tell him there and you can go for a ride around the block." You know, I mean, it sort of sounds like it would be out of a movie, like that movie mid-90s. This was it. You know, that with me and my brother were very much doing a mid-90s thing,

and he put ski goggles on me and took more pictures in here, and we went for a ride around the block, and we lost my knowledge. But it was hilarious. And I still remember these pictures quite well. And then we had a flood in our basement and the negatives and the prints were completely

ruined from the like basically being in two feet of a back-up toilet and it's unredeemable.

So in a way, it's almost better that those photographs don't exist. I don't know what to describe it better than this, but I'll try.

“I think sometimes a story can be just as impactful as a photograph. I think sometimes”

if a storyteller or a writer can convey an image that is then in the listener or reader's mind, it can exist like a photograph. And I play a little bit with that in my new book, and I'm happy to talk about the relationship with texting and literally get there. But yeah, that's essentially the origin story. And then literally the next week I go to my dad, because my dad was of way, obviously he wasn't calmer. He wouldn't have left my brother with me

tied to the top of the car. He comes back the next week. And I knew he studied photography and college, he had no mic on 35 millimeter camera with two or three lenses. And so I asked him if I could borrow it and I just started taking photographs and it didn't stop. Yeah, I mean, what a beautiful, and this is if you didn't say, but this is your twin brother, are you the younger one? Well, it was actually, it was actually my older brother. He's two and a half

“years old, okay. Yeah, and then I have a twin brother as well, who I think my dad and him were”

somewhere, which in fly I was the one that ended up being tied to the trick. That's cool. Yeah, we're going to take one challenge that's on the way, you know? Yeah. Yeah, I also think like the camera is this way of communicating without words and it's communicating from human interaction or interacting with an environment. And when I was younger, I don't know that I was, I was kind of shy and I wasn't as good

with words or I didn't often know how to insert myself in a situation. And as soon as I got that camera, I was walking around my middle school, taking photos of my friends and people that work necessarily my friends. I would just see somebody with an interesting face and I'd ask and if I could take their portrait. And then, of course, then, yes, because I was, they knew who I was,

it wasn't a massive school. But it allowed me to have these interactions that I'd never

would have otherwise. And it's, you know, a lot of people talk about it as this sort of past port or this license to enter into these situations where you are either an outsider or you're

“seeking the sense of belonging. And I think photography is really good at that. Photography is really”

good at that. And I am, just like you, it's funny to say that, because I picked up a camera and started using it more purely for that way to meet other people, at least open up a conversation. Because I was always awkward in that respect. Sorry to cut away from the episode from minute, but I wanted to talk to you about something very quickly. Now, I spent a long time thinking that isolation was part of the deal when it came to photography. That if you were so hit serious

it would all cohere into something meaningful. And it sometimes did. But mostly, I was just alone

with my doubts and no one to push back on them. What changed things for me wasn't a course or a workshop. It was a conversation with someone who was doing the same kind of work and cared about it in exactly the same way I did. The doubts didn't disappear, but they got a little bit smaller and

“I felt more okay with them. They got named. That's what I'm building with the mood inside us.”

It's a place where the work is taken seriously, where you can bring your questions. And of course, your hard-finished ideas and where someone would actually engage with them. We have the ad-free

extended podcast episodes with bonus content. We have monthly Masterclasses, Q&A sessions and of course,

the weekly book clubs and direct access to me and my team. Because you don't have to do this alone. So, the link is in the show notes and hopefully I'll see you inside. Fast forward into kind of your professional years and kind of adulthood. When did photography then? I'm not going to ask you to pick a date, obviously, but roughly how and when did photography stop being something you did and became more of a way that you understood yourself. So, maybe less so of that connective

tissue between you and other people and more back on yourself and kind of making sense of your own

life, your own family, your own world. Yeah, that's a great question.

Yeah, I don't know the date. Sorry, Matt. I can't give a specific date, please. Yeah, I can't speak to the process and it was sort of an undoing. I'm highly educated in photography, meaning I studied at middle school. I took photography classes in high school. I started in a business school to large university in the States and after a semester applied to their arts school as well. Because I was in a large enough college where, you know, university where there was the business

college and, you know, college of arts and sciences that had to be a photography program and I used my high school photography to apply to that and I knew if I was going to make it through college,

“I needed to have a creative outlet in photography and then that for me in many ways. That's how I”

I studied that in undergrad and then I went and lived in New York City and worked professionally in photography. All the while I was, you know, making work in these academic environments. I don't know that until at least you're in graduate school, you're not necessarily making work on a higher level. There are undergrads that make really impressive projects and potentially and start their career there. That wasn't my experience. I could look back in my undergrad.

It feels a little cringy, but it's not in the bad way. It's just not as well considered or realized. But I think that I had from all of that teaching. I had learning. I had all the teachers on my shoulder and there's kind of telling me what to do and I had this knowledge and background in our history. I got in our history degree as another ad as well and I think I was a little bit overburdened by that when I actually set out to be like,

okay, I think I can make it as an artist or I can come in and try and make these this personal work.

“I think I was confused as to why I was making the work and I felt like, oh, if it's important,”

if it's important, it should be in the tradition of social documentary or something like that. And I think the North Forest project for me, I worked on it for seven years and when I started that project, I was trying to convince myself that I was making this documentary work about a farming community, setting the mountains and the western part of my home state. And I knowledge for the home state part. But I wasn't, I was still trying to have this sort of object

tovity and it wasn't until I went into grad school and I had it advisors and peers that were really pushing against that and saying, no, this work is about something else. It's much more

let the world unfold around you as you're making pictures, it will reflect back

you why you're actually at the work will reflect back at you, why you're actually making it, like the pictures are the best teachers. I think sometimes you're learning something in the process of making the pictures, but it isn't until months or sometimes years later when you're actually looking at the negatives or the prints that you realize, oh, that's what I was after. And yeah, I hope that answers your initial question. It's certainly and it's definitely a long-term

process and you don't really realize what's happening in the moment when you're making these images

and often it becomes a retrospective process where you, yeah, like you said, you look back and go,

“oh, that is, okay, so that's why, or even asking a quote, why am I why am I making these types of images?”

And you mentioned North Walk, let's talk about that quickly because there's a perfect example of what you described in going out somewhere to have an intention to make a project about something and over the course of seven years in your case, it becoming something different and about something different. When, I mean, you didn't, I presume you didn't realize that after seven years, but as some point during the process, you kind of understood that this may be about something different.

Can you elaborate on that and kind of from the inception of North Walk? What was that specific intent and went now after you've published it? What would you say it's about?

“Yeah, if I think back to my first trip to that valley, so this valley, the first time that I”

went there was seven years old, and it's this Bikrarian River Valley in Colorado, my aunt and uncle and six of their children at the time were living in a tent on a friend's property at the base of this mountain. And they were off the grid before it was sort of, there was even a phrase for it. It was not like totally, you know, nowadays it's a lifestyle back then. It was they were just doing it because they could save money, and they were on this sort of shared adventure together.

And I grew up in the suburbs, southwest at Denver, so going from this suburban neighborhood to see my other side of my family living this way, it was exciting, it was terrifying, it was this sort of

“imaginative fantastical world as a kid, and I loved going there. We went two or three times,”

and then my dad and his older brother, they had had a lot of disputes since teenage, they were teenagers, and they ultimately led to a falling out when there was a preacher trust as adults,

and so there was nearly a 20-year period of time where I never went to this place, and it only

grew up in my imagination. I just had these childhood memories that these summer days spent free-ranging with my cousins, and I knew the place, and I had this imaginative version of it in my head, and I had this idea of like, "Oh, I want to make work about these subjects." And that was sort of the documentarian talking to me. And I was trying to ignore this real personal side of why I even knew that this place existed. If I'm being real like that first trip, I wasn't

acknowledging those memories. Truly, and I had also heard some stories about my uncle that made me cautiously entering that community, and I didn't necessarily want to tell them who my uncle was, because the story is my dad's son, Richard, he probably crossed people in the community, and it turns out that that was sort of the case. There were definitely people that would have kind of like get lost if I told them, you know, so in a certain way, I became a part of this

community. I essentially met a vinegar and orchardist who let me sleep on his land and he showed me around, and then I was a sculptor who was house sitting on the branch, he let me sleep on his couch, and then he introduced me to a gardener and a woman who actually studied photography in the 70s that the see if he's discarded to, she had a guest house, she let me sleep in it, and that's

and the camera gave me an excuse to be there. The camera allowed me to get that world in focus,

“both the one in my rear view from childhood that I was trying to evoke and bring forth in the pictures,”

and the real North fork that existed. Like, I had to, I had these two places that were geographically the same, but as an adult, you're viewing things slightly differently. So I was trying to use the camera to evoke that childhood wonder that experience of being in that place as a kid, those the warm light on those summer days and evenings, and sort of what that place held for me, the mystery of that, the warmth of it, the intimacy of family, the strange and beautiful colorful

foods that my aunt grew, all of those things were that she grew in prepared, she's a macrobiotic chef. All those things were part of what I was trying to bring into the work. I mean, if you equate it to music, it was like, I knew with some of the notes, where that I was trying to hit, and I just had to riff for a while and find the right notes. I love that analogy. Yeah, so I just stayed in this place, and I hit a lot of back notes. I hit a lot of the wrong notes.

“But I came back from that first trip, and I remember, I spent 10 days in the North fork, I spent”

two weeks staying at my brother's house. My older brother was living in Boulder at the time, and I stayed at his place, and I just drove up and down the front range, taking pictures,

which is like the area that spans, basically, Colorado Springs all the way north to four

columns, and Denver is right in the middle, and all that kind of is where the Eastern Plains meet the Rocky Mountains. And I live there now, and I'm making work in this area now. It's an interesting place for me, still. But I remember I came back, and I had these two distinct places that I had

“making pictures, and there were maybe one or two photographs from that, yeah, there's two photographs”

from that first trip that ended up in the book. One of them is the final photograph, and it's where I slept by the river on that veterinary sled, and it's just the headlights of my car on this tall summer grass, and some of the trees and the distance are coming up, but it's really, it evokes that sense of longing and nostalgia and searching, and yet it's the final note of the book. And I kind of love that, that the last image in the book, most viewers wouldn't know this, is from one of the very

first photos that I took, and there's sort of a poetry to that, even though that has more to do with

the edit that I did with trust fast here than anything, it wasn't necessarily something preconceived, or it doesn't really matter, but for me that I find some poetry in that, and then the other picture that I took that first trip was of that sculpture that I mentioned, and it was at five three in the morning, and I woke up on it so far, and I look, and he's standing there in the kitchen, and he's talking to his three cats, and what of them's outside the window, and he's just talking

to your little crack in the window, and I, you know, rub my eyes, and it looks like this perfect

painterly light, a orangeish red light, first light at the morning, cresting over the mountain,

coming through this window, and just casting it across this late 70s, 70 year old, early 80 year old, I'm not sure exactly what his age was at the time, but he was later in life, and he's standing there just in a white tank top, and looking down, and I just told him not to move. - You don't move? - Yeah, can you please just say there, and he just kept talking to his cats, and I set up my camera, and I made some pictures, and I remember getting that photograph back,

mistreated me, the sense of distance, but also I felt intimately connected to him. There were

things gestures that reminded me of my dad, and so anyway, there was this psychological element when I got the pictures back, like, oh, I'm doing this thing, but I still was like, no, this is a picture of a member of this community, which is true, but now I would say, if you were to look at the book, all the photographs of the people, whether or not they are, whether or not I'm related to them, they are all surrogates for my memories of family. They are all like, and it also questions

that idea of like, how do we find family? How do we find meaning? How do we find belonging? And

ultimately every person that I met in that valley throughout making that work, somewhere more

amenable to being photographed than others, but I can genuinely say almost every single person that I spent time with, consider considerable time. They were generous with me, they cooked me meals, we I cooked them meals, I slept on their land, I slept in their barn, I slept in my car in their driveway, like all of these, they were welcoming in the way that family can be welcoming,

“and I think, in the end, when I look at those pictures, I was looking to reshape notions of family,”

and I think I could never make those photographs now. It was out of very specific period of time

in my life. When I had specific longings, desires, they were directing the work, subliminally or not. Like, I was I was looking for my family, and I didn't want to admit that, and it was the third trip back there that I walk in the local food co-op, and I write about this the back in the back of the book. But there was a woman, you gave me this uncanny feeling, and sure enough it was my art, and then the next time at my cousins, now several of whom are quite

close, one of whom I consider one of my dear friends, like somebody who, if the going gets tough, he's one of the five people I call, you know, and that's just unreal to me. And in the end, I ended up meeting my wife there, so crazy. You know, I wouldn't have been in that place. I wouldn't have gone back to that valley. We're not for photography. We're not for having a camera. That gave me a reason to go. It gave me a reason for being there, and it also gave me a space

“through explore this imaginative version of the place, and make it tangible. I think that that's what”

the book does, and that's what the picture is in that series. People can see it and they can feel the north fork of the 1990s, even though it was the north fork of 2011 to 2018 that I photographed. You can, you can feel both, and that's, there's something special that you can feel the child like wonder, but you can also feel, in adult, who is exploring genuine desires, you know, and, yeah, I look at certain pictures in that book, and I think that one reminds me of playing with

my cousins. That one reminds me of what I was looking for at that time in my life, and I found it

“in more ways than one. I found family in so many ways, so I think that backstory is interesting,”

and it drove the picture-making, but the viewer doesn't need to know that. You come to you come to work with your own connotations. You come to photography, whether you know it or not, it's a very excessive old medium, and I like that about it. I like that, well, especially nowadays we're inundated with imagery, so to make your photograph that makes somebody stock in their tracks and look, there's becoming increasingly harder, but it doesn't mean

things that I really leaned on in that book was there are a lot of quiet pictures, and there

are, there isn't great action, and it's not, I'm not using flash, it's all natural light, it's all kind of the specific constraints that I gave myself for that work, and I think it allows the viewer to experience their own narrate for, and that's the beauty. I love that. I don't want that that book to be leading the viewer, telling the viewer what to think about the pictures.

“It's, everyone's allowed to have their own experience, and hey, yeah, I trust that's what”

it was for you when you found that book. Yes, but now hearing you talk about it in person makes it even more rich, I think, if that's possible, you talk about the last image in the book, which is my favorite image. I couldn't explain why it's my favorite image, but I felt before you even explain it when you explain it, just going, yeah, that's exactly what I get from that image, that feeling of desire and searching for something, but also that feeling of nostalgia and memory,

and uncertainty, what's next, and how amazing that one image can evoke so many emotions like that,

and thoughts, and perspectives, and the whole book just does that from page to page. There's this playfulness, there's the warmth throughout the book. You've answered so many questions, but I had by talking about it, this root of the book in desire for family or at least family connection, and understanding where your place within the family might be, and just remembrance, like you said, the power of an image to do two things. One is to display a subject in that moment,

in that moment in time, as well as give form to that image from the photographer's perspective. You know, what is that photographer doing and thinking and reminding themselves of that of at that

“time, and I think that's why the book is so good, because you can put yourself in it. You can not”

put yourself in it, because we've all had those summers, and we've all had those kids playing around, whether we're children or we have our own children, we've had those beautiful moments of being in a field and eating fresh fruit, or seeing your granddaughter, your uncle, you know, talk to animals, or whatever they're doing in the kitchen, or these little kind of tetherings that we can attach ourselves to, back in our own childhood, as well as maybe,

now you're a father, we'll get onto that later, but maybe in parenthood as well, so there's so many nice to it. Hearing that description, too, you know, I think one thing I was really trying to avoid was having to work between two saccharin or sugarcoded, you know, like pork you call it,

“which could have fallen into those traps, easily, and I think for me it was about”

looking at some of the shadow sides of the place, too, or like the, you know, looking into, it wasn't a perfect family story, there was this, you know, the breaking apart of family ties in a way that I think also led to that, like the longing wasn't based on these perfect memories, it was based a little bit in heartache, or struggles that my own family had gone through, and really wanting to make amends, or find the sense of reproachment, and yeah, I think

yeah, there's a, you know, the reparations from a strangement, right? Yes, and it, and it happened, and, you know, and the work, and it happened and it brought me there, but in the end, I also had these boxes on boxes of negatives that tell their own story, and technically, you know, I could have edited the thousands of photos that I shot in a totally different way, but I, I created a specific edit, and then I brought that to the gentleman at Trust Passer, Matthew and Brian

and Cody, and spent a three day weekend with Matthew and Brian just editing those pictures on a table, and we ultimately took my 60 picture at it, went out it down to, I think, about 45,

46 pictures, and then looked at contact sheets, and identified two photos that I had never even

in the project. So, you know, back to that analogy of music, I had done all this riffing,

I had made these recordings, you know, that's essentially what photos are, and then I had to find somebody that knew how to master them in the right way, and the team at Trust Passer, just knows how to make a good book, but I also think that the work was ready for them, and so it was in this place where it needed to, it needed to find the right balance between all the different types of pictures that I had been making, and then we needed to make all the material decisions of

the book and how that would feel, and the book's designer Victor Balco, who's based in front

“for did an amazing job as well, and so really, I think when you're working on a book, it's about”

finding a team that understands the vision for the work, and that needs to be true of the publishers, it needs to be true of the graphic designer who ends up working on the project,

and I feel really lucky because I'm about to release my second book, and in both cases,

I wouldn't change it like, and I don't know how many photographers can say that, but I feel like it's probably a rare thing when making a book there's inherently compromises, but I don't even remember what those compromises are, with the Norfolk, and I don't feel like I had to make any substantial compromises with some pictures. Now, there comes a point in every photographer's journey where gear or technique stops being the question, you've learned your camera, you can read light,

you know how to edit, how to produce, what a good frame looks like, and you can probably make one on demand quite easily, but something is still missing, the work feels good, competent, maybe even pretty, but it doesn't quite feel completely yours, it doesn't really say anything that couldn't have been said by someone else on Instagram with the same camera. That's the moment most people get stuck, not at the beginning, but right here, right there, somewhere in the middle

of it, in the midst of it, where you have all the tools, but not really any of the language. And the reason it's so hard to move past is because nobody can teach you your voice in a tutorial or a silly little YouTube video, because it's not a setting on the dial, it has to be drawn out of you slowly by methods and introspections that actually allow you to look at yourself and your work and challenge you with the harder questions all in order to draw out your unique and photographic

“voice. That's what my voice alchemy mentorship program is. It's an online container for photographers”

who really already know how to use their camera, but want to use it to say something that's more meaningful and that actually matters to them. Personalized strategy, honest feedback and the kind of work that builds their body, a voice and a brand that actually gets noticed. It's not a course,

it's just the thing I always wished I had had and it's the thing I now spend most of my days doing.

The link is in the show notes, so if something in this is calling you hit the link and we'll see where you're at. When I first read Northfork or first saw Northfork, I noticed that a lot of the people in the images, in fact, I think all of them we don't see the full face and I love that. There's almost like a motif as well as you know people lighting down, whether whatever the position they're in like screens and screens, these beautiful little motifs that run through the book

and especially with the people and the portraits, is this an intentional technique or what do you

“kind of read into that kind of way of displaying people? Yeah, I think that also goes back to what”

I was talking about with the edit. I made plenty of, I made plenty of pictures. Okay, tell me about that choice, that deliberate choice, then with you and Matthew and Brian. Yeah, well, some of the stuff was in large part of that was already a code of the language that I brought to the project and brought to them. But we stuck with it and there are, you know, there are, there are certainly images where you can see their face. But yeah, it also probably has to do with the camera that I

get anything focused, closer than forfeets. So I'm, I'm seeking, then the process of making that work,

I was seeking to make intimate photographs. And yet I was constrained by the fact that I couldn't

“get closer than forfeet to something. So I'm trying to make this sense of intimacy. And I think”

having that constraint actually helps create some of the language of the project. And it also led me back to the way that I was creating pictures. And, you know, I can think of this picture that I took of these two sisters, dizzy and cc. And I spent an entire morning and really afternoon with them and they showed me their chickens and their chicken coop and their pigs and we're walking around and just like having a great time on their farm. And a certain toy, I'm taking this portrait

of the younger sister, cc, leaning against this platform white wall. And her older sister, Izzy, starts climbing this rope right behind me. She keeps climbing it. And then all of a sudden,

“her shadow is throughout her love image. Yeah. See, a bunch, cc. And it wasn't like I told her to do that.”

It was just the universe. Like it was me being playful because I had a camera. I never would have

been hanging out with these two girls, other words. Yeah. But their parents were good with it. They wanted photos of their daughters. And they knew why I was there. And I knew why I was there. And I had all this tension, good intention. And I took these pictures of cc and Izzy, Shada was changing, she is leaning back and just playing out of an out and swinging on this rope. And I took these pictures of cc and most of them, she's just looking directly, she's looking

directly back at the lens. And after a third one, I advanced the film, clicked and she puts her hands

“over her eyes because the sun was too intense. But what I didn't know at the time, she had painted”

each of her fingernails, it's different, like alternating colors. And she had green, like she had been doing some sort of art project and had green paint or marker all over her hand. And that when I looked at the photos, it was completely obvious that that was the image. And it wasn't something that I had told her to put her hands over her eyes. But then once again, it's like another one of those pictures of people where she's partially concealing her face. And I knew that it kind

of got at that everyday moment as a child, it feels like a dream or it is version of a person. And when you can't see a person's entire face, you can almost place yourself in their shoes, a little bit easier. There's like a way in or through, obviously, like one of the more iconic well known images is that Tara and who's the farmhand with the blonde hair and her heads turned. And I didn't foresee that picture coming either. And it has its own story and it happened

in its own way. And it has its own connotations. A lot of people can choose pregnant in the photo, and that's great for me. Like I like that people read into these pictures and find to meaning through gestures. It's how throughout the history of portraiture, we looked at what that the way that painters and the Renaissance placed their subjects hands. Like what the hands are doing communicates almost as much as the face. So in that particular photo,

you could argue because you can't see the face. And you only see one of her hands. That one hand is doing a lot of work in terms of signifiers of how we view the image and how we read into it, how we impose our own story wide on it. Hey, everyone felt like you're doing everything right and still not land in the job. I am a large, more sophisticated host of the award-winning Thrive Korea's podcast. Where we help ambitious professionals and newcomers break through the noise

and build careers you love. Each week, I sit down with export guests, recruiters,

tips to interviews, promotions to pivots. This is the place where career clarity meets confidence. Soon into the Thrive Korea's podcast of Spotify, Apple Podcast or wherever I get your shows and let's try it together. One of the things that's explained and there's this visual language

“that you're so good at in this book. When it comes to language, another thing that I think is so”

respected in the book is the essay by Rebecca Solnet. And I know she's had a big impact on you. And I only know that because I listen to your podcast with your twin brother and you guys talked about her, but just for our audience, can you touch upon her impact and maybe what she may have taught you or you know, giving you a different insight with regards to photography itself that maybe you hadn't, you know, understood or experienced? Sure. It's funny that I literally have

one of her more recent books. Right next to me, which is called no straight road, takes you there, essays for uneven terrain, which is a beautiful title and sub-title for the times we're living in that there's just so much uncertainty in the world right now. We're living in dark times and I would say she is one of the beacons of light in terms of reframing anything from climate catastrophe to political mayhem to toxic masculinity. She knows how to approach all those subjects in a way that

is both lyrical and poetic, but also allows us to see the world through a lens that's generous and compassionate and giving and she, understandably, has an interest in the socio-political book. She's also written beautifully about a range of subjects ranging from land use in the American

West to the history of photography. She wrote an amazing book about Edward Moybridge. She's also

written on the subject of walking, which one could argue photography and walking have a lot in common

“and the way in the pace of walking allows for a specific type of looking, which is, I think,”

supported also by photography. I think the pace in which, sure, you can throw a camera on your back and get on a bike and go bike around and you might see something interesting. That's one way to do it and it sure there's a lot of photographers that do it that way and come across things that they wouldn't have had because they can cover creator terrain on a bike or in a car. But I also think there's something to be said for noticing the smaller things and walking

and being at that pace. And she wrote this book called "Wonderless" and when I teach

introduction to photography, I always have these intros students read the first chapter, which is

called "Tracing a Hadland". The Hadlands are in Marine County in the Bay Area and it's this old, there's this old military presence that if you look closely, it's kind of buried in the hills. But a lot of people just go there to recreate. There's great trails. I hope everybody in their lifetime gets the hate on the dipsy trail. It's just an unbelievable trail. But this essay, whether or not you've been there, you read it and it talks about the act of going from seal to toe.

It's really granular into the feeling of walking and the feeling of perception and then understanding

the layers of history and landscape and how to detect that. And I always come back after these students

have read it and they said, "Why do you think I gave you this?" That's a to read. Because it

“doesn't, it's not explicitly about photography. And I think they understand that in that first”

second week of the semester that photography is so much more than just reading about photography. I think to watch a film or listen to a good, a good, an amazing album start to finish. And

about sequencing. And in the past decade, the photography book world has exploded in its own way and the language around sequencing has become more commonplace in the photo world. But that was not even a phrase that was mentioned to me when I studied photography and undergrad. And you know,

“that was about 20 years ago, so I'm dating myself a long time. I think it's evolving, photography”

is evolving, the form of the photo book is evolving. And that's exciting. I think that's

a great thing. I hope that's not too randomly an answer. But yeah, I'd never back a soul in it.

On, it's actually a perfect answer for her because she is known for writing these long sentences that really tie in at the end. And she had heard essay in my book is no exception. It essentially a lot of people read it. And like, why is there no mention of childhoodist folk? And it's in the last two paragraphs that she brings you back. And it's really talking about the act of photography. And the history of making pictures. And it's uses and abuses. And even some of the analogy is

the photography. I know she talks about relating the idea of a photograph and the language around the word capture. Like to capture something. Sounds like you're taking a, it's, it's about possession. And, and that's sort of a misuse of photography. And she writes beautifully about how like a lot of the pictures are out of slants. Or I'm looking at things indirectly. And how that can actually be a more honest slave talking about the world or looking at the world. And I find that

really nice. I mean, obviously, like, I was, I was very humbled when she said yes to write BSA. And we, um, after she had written it, I met up with her in Santa Fe and made some pictures of her there as well. And I had photographed her for an editorial assignment for the New York Times

“style magazine to magazine in 2017. And that's how we first met. So I have her email address and I said”

her the edit and sequence that I made with Brian and Matthew. And I think she got back to me in the day saying yes, I'll, I'll do this. And it was great. But she's also extremely busy person. And I think doesn't really have time for stuff like that. Um, so I'm ever more grateful that she said yes. And I think the essay is, this, this is wonderful. She took a few from the way that we had sequenced the pictures, which is sort of, it's not a road trip story in the grandiose sense

of the American road trip because I stayed in Miss Sally. And I was following these dusty, windy roads and kind of circling back a lot. And her essay, the structure of the essay kind of

runs in that way. And in the end, she even mentions that all of her explanation in the first

80% of the essay is in Mom Dusty Road up to the pictures. And that's, that's it. Like she saw what the book was about and, and the form of the book and then applied that in her, uh, in into her prose in a literary sense. And I, I don't know that I've ever read an essay that reflects the sequencing of the book. Um, but she did that. So, um, now I've read that. Well, yeah, and thank you for introducing me to her through the north fork worker. It, um, she adds the cherry on top for

shorting the essay. And you talked about the, how she talks about this word capture. And I want

“to read a paragraph for audience, um, in this essay because it, it speaks a lot to me. And I think”

it's a nice segue into some pictures, uh, and I'll explain why, but the last sentence really,

really hit me hard in this paragraph. Sometimes you can glimpse in a second, but only see

through long contemplation. Other forms of perception are indirect, fugitive, elusive. They are the shadows and traces and reflections that are as much part of what the eye takes in a solid object, just as some things can be understood through intuition, not reason. You see, rather than the person, the impression their head left on the pillow, rather than the truck, the way the tires

or hands on the tool, or just how something is far from new by all the cracks or fading or frame.

“Like search and rescue teams, we learn to retrace is of what passed by. I think that's a, uh, a”

wonderful paragraph, uh, and so well written and like you said, tying, even though that's a paragraph in that in the long essay is still ties in and she just kind of sums it up with a beautiful sentence at the end. And I feel like now kind of knowing your story more and having had a, the privilege of seeing the images in your new book and the layout and the text that you add with with that and we're going to kind of dive deep into that in a minute. I feel like Rebecca there didn't really know

that she was writing maybe a little bit about your next project in terms of this kind of search and rescue methodology and not so much in the literal sense, um, but in terms of searching for your family and searching for kind of history and connection to that as well as potentially rescuing yourself or rescuing some kind of remnants from what happened. So can you give me, you know, maybe a response to that, but as you do an overview of some pictures and what this, this, it incredibly

powerful and emotional project that you've been working on over the last few years. Well, that I hadn't read the essay in a while that those words are, it really gets at the texture of what that book is and such and in such a summed-up kind of way that I could, I could have

never done myself. Yeah, so some pictures is a book exploring another aspect of my family's past

in which when I was not quite four years old, my family had left on family vacation, my dad and I flew out the day prior to, flew out to the East Coast, the day prior to my mom and my older brother and my twin brother and they all flew on July 19, 1989 and they were taking a flight from Denver to Chicago and then Chicago at a Boston. But on that flight from Denver to Chicago, the rear-fandest in the rear engine had a hairline fracture of a crack, literally

miniscule little crack in this, Miss Manifactured Fandest and that crack reached its

critical stress level essentially and exploded somewhere over Iowa and it took out all of the

planes hydraulics and the plane managed to stay in the air for another 41 minutes could pretty much

“only turn in one direction and managed to have one big looping left turn I believe and then”

essentially lined up with a runway in Susity, Iowa, Sugeway Airport and missed the runway by a few feet, the front wheel dug into the ground and the plane crash landed. Now the miracle of that day is more than half the past of years on board and almost all of the flight personnel and everybody in the cockpit survives including my two brothers, my mom and 111 others died and so it's this event that really shook our family and it was quite literally this dark cloud over my

childhood certainly in the decade afterwards and in that time I essentially felt because I wasn't on on the plane that everything that my two brothers were dealing with who both sustained quite

“critical physical injuries and they their problems were more important than nine or that's how I”

viewed it and so I think in a way when you when you started a project I didn't know that that was really

how can I share my side of this experience? How can I come to terms with the fact that I'm never

going to really know who my mom was or have a active relationship with her and in certain ways this project enabled me to do that it enabled me to look at the earth that she made when she was alive it made me look back at photos they had been taken in the decade before the crash many of which I

“had never seen before and so this book combines these I think they're about five prematurely”

artworks that my mom made she was a very talented filmmaker and her mom fastidiously saved her

artwork over the years and so I have these drawings that she needed it's a little girl one of

which is called the big drop and it literally looks like a plane coming in for a question and they are a flight path profile yeah another one is called fire and it's just a plane and it's his fire above it in water color another one she painted a water color of the sunset or sunrise on the lake in which she grew up I guess and the way I found it it was upside down and it looks like smoke coming out in a cornfield and so I presented that way in the book because I thought surely

this can't be and then I saw it said our last name in 1963 and the top left corner but it was upside down and then I flipped it over and realized I was looking at the place in which she had grown up

“and I think I knew that that particular piece needed to be in the work somehow and then she”

did this sort of Edward Munchens fire screen image of these faces disappearing and receding in a line and they all seem to be seeing or screaming you're not quite sure but it's fun candy when you place it in the context of a plane crash now all of that is said it's very sorrowful and dark and gloomy and there are those elements in the work and there is that element to my childhood and my upbringing and my family story and in many ways I ignored my grief until I was in adults and I

felt I was in this safe place to do so about a decade ago I was in a it was a year into being

“in the relationship with my now wife Emma and I think partly because of that I felt safe to”

go into this and a darker side of my past and just see what it might turn up well what might turn up through these creative acts with a candle and and placing myself in some of these places so my first my first act you could say was to go to the crash site and my two brothers

really encouraged me to do that as well I never would have started this project if they

had felt uneasy about it that's really important to me and now that I've made the book my twin brother who was a writer and an editor his name's Fencer Bailey and he has a great podcast called Time Sensitive good plug good plug we will me it is a great plug it is a great podcast by the way it is he's very very big yeah but as nuts in the side he wrote a they essay and they really reflects his knowledge and understanding of the story of which he is apart but also as a writer

who has done a great deal of work facing about memorials and memorialization and I think photography and memorialization are very intertwined and I think a photograph has the promise to last forever certainly to outlast its maker and I think that that premise alone should not be enough for somebody to click a shutter but it does speak to the power of photography to bear witness this idea that you can bear witness to a moment and it doesn't need to be a you know a moment in which there

can speak to time passing and memorials I think do that in a really interesting way and I kind of

get at that in the photography and in some of the writing this idea of what it means to try to remember somebody or what it means to grieve and grieving and photography and memorials and grieving there's like a fin diagram there but all of these things can

“kind of coexist and I think the role of photography within grief and memorialization is really important”

and there is a catharsis that can come from that it doesn't mean that every picture I took that felt cathartic in the moment of taking it ended up in the project that must have done did it and some of the pictures that I took where I wasn't necessarily feeling that catharsis I wasn't feeling what I thought I should feel end up in the work as well so I think that there's this idea of what you want the work to do and how it makes you feel and then there's the moment

that you're behind the camera creating this momentum if you want to call it that or this

“engraving in time and I think that those moments they can feel very different than how”

in the moment and how they feel as a photograph after the fact and I think when you're working on a project as emotional as this one has them understanding that distinction both in the act

of making because if I was always just seeking a feeling before I click the shutter I would have

missed some stuff and if I went into that if I went in and started editing and trying to decide which picture should end up in a possible sequence if I was not able to remove myself emotionally I think I'd be looking at it my heart would be too close to the work and in this project it was been nearly impossible that that form of of editing of being a little bit more objective and I've really leaned on Cecil one of the co-founders of Chettos Kami in the publisher who's

making the book who's putting it out and she's a woman that lives halfway across the world in Marseille and in France and doesn't know me doesn't know my family but she has a really good eye for visual language and photographic language and understands photography books better than almost anybody and so and so too and I lot of somebody like that that is very learning but not emotionally attached to the work helped me get past that interval like I got very close and similar to my experience with

trust constantly I brought her a size of all edit and a folder of b-sides and she made sense of it all

and represented it to me and we made a few slight changes but it's very close to that first edit

that she said me and at that moment I knew I was working with the right person for this project

“which is so so important when you're doing something like a book now when it comes to photography”

the whole infrastructure of the internet rewards speed post more post faster be first be everywhere the algorithm doesn't care whether you went deep it cares whether you showed up yesterday and I guess that's not photography specific now for me I built my work around a different bet that there are people who would rather go slowly and understand something fully than go fast and understand probably nothing that depth is not a liability that the work you make

feed maybe or chasing the algorithm now the mood inside us is built on that same bet it's a

“private community for photographers and visual artists who are serious about the slow work we have”

monthly masterclasses where we actually go deep on craft and thinking we have a weekly book club monthly Q&A's we have the podcast of course but add free with bonus content and we have direct access to me in my team it's not another newsletter you'll forget about not a discord server full of noise it's a room with a small number of serious people and a very clear and supportive focus it's just $19 a month the link is in the show notes and I really hope I can see you inside

but I want to drill down a little bit more on kind of the purpose around making this book both

before you started it and now it's about to come out into the world and how you can kind of separate your emotional space from it and able to process it's publication essentially and I wanted to read I mean the text in the book is is so wonderful and I both in the north fork and and this

“more so I love how you've combined the text with the images because I think it really needs that”

certainly this book and I want to read a little bit of an excerpt because I think it will kind of lead to the question that I've just asked you in terms of like the purpose the real intent and that the what you want to get from this book or what you wanted to get from the making of this book the slab of granite engraved with my mum's name is loose it wiggles under the pressure of my foot I do not feel her spirit in any greater frequency here than I do elsewhere I long for a

dialogue between us so there can be an us how do you reconcile that now have do you feel I mean being three years old when your mum passes away I guess like there's obviously limited

“conscious memory of her but being in your blood and being the closest family member you ever had like”

the grieving is so visceral but it must have been really difficult to attach that grieving to something because you didn't have so many memories of her so how was that being since you wrote this and you did the book do you feel like there's been some kind of dialogue between you and her or at least an attempt to really make that relationship something or some kind of material fashion. Yeah I mean like I said earlier I don't feel like I know her or I have a sense of greater sense

of her maybe necessarily than when I started the project but I like the idea of of trying to understand her that limited relationship offers space for creativity it offers space for making work that is in dialogue with an idea of a shared lived experience I also think yeah like I had gone to where she grew up which is where she's buried and I that little excerpt really speaks to what I was just talking about of of feeling something I

think I have this expectation of how I might feel standing in front of her grave stone just as I sometimes have an expectation of how I might feel when I'm putting myself in a situation with my camera and I almost invariably feel differently than how I thought I might feel in that moment when I'm there and sometimes the world is more interesting than I could have ever imagined and that's very true and so many of the cases of all of the different things that I did to make these

pictures by going to the crash site, by going to where she grew up and in the Adorondats and Upstate New York by becoming the father which when I started the project the working title with some pictures I've been calling it that and that's S-L-N pictures that S-U-N. It is sort of a cheeky reference to

Henry Fox Talbot's some pictures from Northern Scotland which is one of the first photo books

of all time but I like the idea that the work started with me facing about my limited relationship as a son as my mother's son and as it evolved three years into the project my wife and I

necessarily thinking that it was going to be part of the project but I photographed her throughout

“that pregnancy and I photographed her and just as one does the photographer in the right mind”

would do that. It's that bearing witness, it's trying to pinpoint these moments in time and hold on to these memories and that's something that photography does really well as as well and it's making these moments tangible in an kind of considered way and I just started doing that but I didn't want to say that it was part of the project partly because I don't like it when I'm working on a project and there's all

this pressure like the pictures have to be a part of the project which like that's never that's

not a useful feeling and then and then that can also lead to really contrived image making and so I really try to just loosen it and like riff like I go back to that analogy it's just trying to see what feels right in each moment and then makes sense of it after the fact and kind of mash it together in a way that it hits those notes and gets at the emotive experience of being in this sentient body of being my mother's son of being the father

and I didn't want to acknowledge it and then in 2023 right at the beginning of the year I shared some of the pictures with Jesse Wendor is a photo editor and and Jackie Bates who is the director of the opinion desk at the New York Times and they love the work and they came back to me and said hey we want to to a preview of this project on Father's Day and my knee jerk was

“once was Father's Day why don't Mother's Day and I remember I remember Jackie emails me back”

and says try this work is about you becoming a father I didn't I didn't see it I couldn't see it and I had to be this editor in New York City who knew me and knows my wife and knows me well and we had worked together in California Sunday magazine we had a history but she she saw something that I wasn't able to see and she pointed it out to me and then we started talking about who would write this up there and we came up with a list of people my twin brother and

included but I also had already asked him like hey this is going to become a book and I want you to write it in essay and and that feels perhaps a little more lasting because it's this physical object that you know isn't just it's going to be an additional archive for printed on newsprint it's this thing you know and so he he was already kind of positioned for that and I just maybe like

“a week or two into it of us before we reached out to any writers I came back to them and I think”

it needs to be neat and I had never read and I had never given myself permission to write

that was my twin brother strain and when you have a twin there's very often this dynamic of not wanting to step on each other's toes or maybe that's like us because we kind of have a healthy dynamic but if he started taking pictures I wouldn't be surprised he he likes to say that he learned he learned he learned how to to make good photographs by watching me work which I that's a nice compliment but I you know I I think I would be totally cool with it if he got into that and I gave

myself permission to write in this context and it also gave me a three month window where I realized that whatever I wrote it was going to be published in in your times and that was definitely a fire under my butt but I also like knew that I I knew that I could do it I felt that I could do it and then when you got up and it's held water motherless son that was about father had but also a title

that title but then when I read the piece it said oh I guess I do know I do know something

“and I think it's it's from from lived experiences that you can gain confidence and allowing”

like if you get a camera around your neck and you go and you have these lived experiences you're gonna learn from that and you're gonna also be coming back with you know it's like the analogy of like a photographer as a squirrel like you go out you collect your acorns come back and you kind of put them in your in your little nest and you're just like maybe you're not gonna harvest them or use them in any tangible way immediately

maybe some of them are gods but inevitably you're gonna have something that you can make meaning out of and I and I like that idea of not forcing meaning on the work

“but maybe the work being where you find the meaning if that makes sense like it's not like”

why would you make the work if you already knew what you were going to do yeah it's an explorer to have you know uh pros to it yeah yeah yeah we go and explore what what this is all about

a short note before we close for a while now the first thing I've done most mornings

before the camera or any other work or before the coffee before the endless tabs is set 10 20 30 minutes just watching the noise inside my head do what noise does it has it just made me comment in the way people imagine it's made me more honest more mindful more compassionate and more free in more ways than I could even describe and that honesty and introspective clarity more than any lens workshop or book is really what changed my photography the work I

make now comes from a quieter place with more cleanness and calmness I notice what I'm reaching for and I notice when I'm reaching for the wrong thing the inner critic still talks still exists I just don't believe everything he says anymore the app I've used for most of this is waking up by Sam Harris it's the one tool I genuinely kept returning to all this time this is not a

“paid sponsorship from them however I am an affiliate partner and for good reason I believe that this”

app is worth it more than any other what's kept me there for years is that it's not just one thing there's a guided daily meditation which is the spine of it for me but there are also short daily reflections a daily quote that tends to do its own quiet work in the background and these little moments they call it of awareness you can drop into during the day two minute resets when the head

starts running there's also an entire library of guest series with teachers I'd never have found

on my own and a lot more besides that it keeps the practice alive instead of letting it calcify into routine so a link sits in the show notes for a free 30 day trial and 20% discount on their subscriptions if you want the longer story though of how meditation reshaped my work there's also a piece linked through my sub-stack page called there's no self development without self awareness anyway hope you enjoy it thanks for listening and what do you hope that viewers get from this

book because it's such a personal you know exploratory you know object essentially that you've you've piece together like said almost like a memento to yourself and I imagine like the whole the whole purpose behind what's a lot of the purpose was catharsism and just trying to be part of your healing process but when you now put it out into the world and as it comes out and and people grab copies of it what do you it's so different from the north fork right

is what do you or or is it or is it in in the aspect what do you hope that viewers will get from this book yeah I view the book as it's in part this outless of memory of grief and in another part it's it's a blueprint for grief I think that you can look at the ways in which I

that were in this archive of a newspaper in in CC Iowa that were taken by these three photo

journalists that photographed the incoming of the plane the crash and it's after math you can look at the way in which cinema shapes memory there was a movie re-enactment of the crash that I watched at seven years old live on ABC TV and Charlton has in place the captain of the plane and I

“remember watching literally having a cockpit view of this event which you know at the time I”

didn't fully it didn't fully register exactly what it transpired the day my mom died and that movie showed me in vivid color and sensational Hollywood acting and lighting and pyrotechnics and it hurt to watch but it also was where some of my memories are based similarly the photo

journalism and I kind of weave all those things together to show that grief is always with us so

those are the archive elements and then I've been making pictures with a large format camera a medium format camera a point to camera and I'm working with all of those different formats in different ways but I'm I'm bringing the viewer in through this sort of history of photography you're looking at at various photographic languages and combining them to tell a narrative driven story about the crash but it's very non-linear you are going back forth in time

so on one page you'll get a picture from 1983 and then the next page you get a picture from

“2023 and so forth and there are echoes throughout and I think that anybody that has experienced”

a loss this tragic as I have anyone that has experienced grief of losing a loved one in a tragic accident there are a lot of triggering events there are a lot of moments in the present tense that unfold unexpectedly that remind you of the past and this book relays that idea of going from a moment in the present to a moment in the past to a lived moment to a fictional moment be a still from a Hollywood movie and how it's all related in this and kind of mixed up

in this stew of memory and prior to me making this project all of those images aside from the ones

“that I made over the past decade all of the archival images for the most part I mean I found some of”

them in 2016 when I went into the newspaper archive I found some of those images for the first time but the language it was all there this this like a sort of documentary photo journalistic pretty 35 millimeter language those pictures were emblazoned in my mind the movie the Hollywood movie was emblazoned in my mind some of these family snapshots from the 80s were also there

I found many when I went into the archive that had never seen before and I realized that my mom

was really artful and poetic and miracle with a camera in a way that I didn't know that when I made the Norfolk project and you can actually look like the picture that's on the cover of the book there's a photo of self-portrait of her in her garden in Black and Orange Colorado and she they planted some poppies and she's just with her shadow with these poppies and her shadows making this beautiful shake and there's all these pictures in the Norfolk there's shadows and

plants and it was it unexpected finding for me to see that image and realize that like I'm just continuing this lineage and and to look at her art and her love of nature and she was

this past week and I'm just thinking of like that right now in terms of working on a project

“and what you're like early on and you're working on a project you might like dig a bunch of little”

holes and put seeds in and and and hope that something grows from it like with photography it's like you're going out and you're exposing film or shooting digital pictures whatever you're format is it doesn't really matter you're you're you're going out with some hope that your time spent will yield something you know so my time spent the garden will hopefully

and with enough water and concentration and and care will yield something that's the same

with the camera might go out in the world might I give enough care to my subject or I focus intently on something I'm I know that I'm creating something that may inspire others are hopefully me too you know just the reason you know that the pathos in in the book it there's definitely a you know an undercurrent of hope and you know connection with other people that might have maybe not had similar experiences but us struggling with grief and might be able to you know

empathize and and and get some feeling of of hope and understanding from from the way you've put this wonderful book together but it has the project has the the photography side of this project and going back into the archives and just that this whole process which is fascinating to me when you're kind of piecing this montage of a book together do you feel like it has actually healed anything in you or do you or has it just given the wound somewhere else to live

“that would be a book yeah no I think with grief it never really leaves you but I do think”

I do think grief is is layered and I've shed some layers I think it's not it's not that I've ever let go of anything but I do think that I've I've come to terms with things and I I also have found in the process of making the book there's not just hope there's humor and there are motifs where you'll be you'll be you'll be you'll turn the pages in this book and there is you'll be faced with a pretty devastating image of the crash and then the

next picture my echo in some way and make you laugh out loud and I'm good with that because humor isn't antidote to grief and it's something that my dad taught me because I saw him wallowing for years and yet he still manages to crack jokes in the face of grief and this this book is an opportunity for me to borrow some of that language that I learned from

“him in a visual way of course and yeah I think I think that's that's the crux of the book it's”

not it's not this dark look at this event that would have solved nothing for me but said it gives the viewer a look inside my brain you know it allows the viewer to see these

dissonant images these pictures that never existed in the same place and it brings them together

it collates them it compiles them into this one unit unified think that shows the many manifestations of how one event can be remembered over and over and over again and how how life experiences that have absolutely nothing to do with that event can even look like it or feel like it there's a great picture I took of my son having it he was probably two and a half at the time and he's having a conversation with a court on the cob and it's just like

this this court on the cob and the light is behind him and his shadow is cast on the court on the cobbies talking to it and pointing at it but it's also like frames right inside the

way like i didn't work history in it it was just the curing as he was sitting at the stool in

the kitchen but it also jumps back to the plane crash which landed at an airport that was leasing a bunch of land to corn farmers and so that was one of the problems that the plane crash was that survivors were literally walking out of shoulder high corn July corn and they had a hard time finding everybody and lost in this foreign field and anytime that I go to a corn maze or eat corn on the cob you know I can't not think of Iowa I can't not think of flight 232

crash and that is something that I was aware of and I didn't go out seeking like okay I'm

going to use this as a prompt and make a picture specifically according to summertime and that happened and it's in my archives and I pulled from it and there was a lot of play in terms of

“creating and edit for the book and I think play and humor and curiosity and imagination”

are what make any photographers stronger you can make work about the dark stuff and the hard stuff but don't negate play humor and imagination curiosity. I'll go one step further with the book

you know looking through the book multiple times now and in PDF 4 I can't wait to get my hands on it

when it is released but it's it's it's love that there's there's so much kind of desire to find a place to put your love for this woman but also love in the risk love can exist in the dark times more than anything so you know that you're talking about kind of the contrast between some of the images that you've put next to each other and you know I'm looking at what right now and one that I think is a presume it's your mother either holding

you or one of your brothers on a road at sunset with you know lit up by I presume it's headlight and it's one of just love and wonder and exploration next to yeah next to an image of one of the aircraft seats after the crash right and there is there is a curiosity in that but putting those

“images next to each other just is so powerful and that's why I think it works but yeah please go”

please explain that I think is it that orange sunset that's yeah so one of the things that I love about this book too and going back and forth essentially like most of the images are made in the 2020s and the 1980s and it's sometimes hard to distinguish whether or not it's the present day Bailey family or the 1980s Bailey family and that picture is my wife and my daughter okay my daughter looks a lot like I did at that age and my son looks a lot like I did at that age

and so there are these pictures of me as a two and a half year old and a three year old and there are these pictures of my children at those ages and it's sometimes hard to distinguish

“between the two and that's sort of where the book ends in a way I think the last slide”

says something about how I see my mom in myself anytime I look in the mirror and and how she lives on in me and in my children and in in us and I think when I wrote those words I realized oh there's closure here I realized this book and it's sort of closing this circle in that this book happens to be arriving at a fairly auspicious time in that it will be released in the U.S. right around the anniversary of the crash but even more so my kids are now six and a

half and three not quite four years old and those are the exact ages my brothers than I were at the time of the crash and so I think in a way if I were looking for a literal reason

and they keep photographing my family and that might turn into other projects and I'm going to

keep exploring subjects that interest me and following leads and not in the following leads and editorial sense following leads in the intuitive sense allowing one picture to lead me to the next one lived experience to need me to the next and I don't know maybe I'll find a way to work on a project that takes less than a decade but I hope so I hope so I do have an offshoot project that is is is coming out of some pictures that didn't make it into some pictures but that I made

it thinking that they were part of that project and I like that I like having an expansive idea

around working within the framework of a project and allowing the pictures to exist in different places you know one of my favorite photographers Robert Adams he has pictures that exist in multiple books like he'll help republish to stay in photo in two or three books and it operates completely differently in different edits and I like that and there might be some of that with some pictures my next project we'll see but I think keeping an open mind as I'm making the work as I'm editing

it and certainly once you've handed over to a publisher it's in their hands and knowing that

“is really important and finding the right publisher to do to work on the project I think is”

important because it needs to be somebody that understands how to handle the materials and I think with some pictures I found the perfect balance of doing a bunch of work myself for close to a decade and then handing it off to somebody that really got underneath the project and got inside it and knew how to handle of wide range of images and make it feel cohesive. Trent I'm gonna end with a passage from the book that you wrote because I feel it gets my goosebumps

going and I feel like it's a nice way to end and as a metaphor for this book in in my mind anyway and I'll explain why after I read it. As children my brothers and I weren't sure if and when our mum would return home from her vacation. On at least one occasion the three of us tried to reach her we started by imagining her up in the clouds as if in a heavenly realm. We wrote her letters and made simple drawings of trees, the sky, the sun, our home and ourselves. We didn't place these

in the mailbox like regular letters rather with our dad's help. We sent them by air mail in envelopes tried tight to cellophane ribbons and helium balloons. We ceremoniously released from our backyard.

“I'll never forget letting go and watching our messages gently waft in the breeze getting smaller”

and smaller until they disappear. Extremely moving words and I feel it could correct me if I'm wrong because I could be way out here but I feel like this book is a metaphor for those letters and now you've kind of found a home to put this book into people's hands as kind of a love letter to your mum. Yeah, like a question that I'm often asked the typhors are often asked when you were working on a project certainly a book project who's the audience and that can change throughout the

duration of the project but I would say for a long period of time working on this project probably up until I reframed and realized that it was about me becoming a dad to I was making these

“photographs through my mouth yeah and you know I think it's great that you kept up on that as”

you know I could technically tie the book to some balloons and send it off you know yeah well with that trend you know we land on a hopeful loving and and beautiful note thank you so much for being over time actually on the moral there in the US thank you so much for spending the time with me and good luck with the book tell us a little bit about when it's coming out where we can

which I believe is just chose commune.com and the book is called Sun Pictures it comes out

“worldwide or ships from Europe and everywhere but the US in mid to late June and then mid July it”

will be shipping in the US the books just take a little bit longer to get here because they're

crossing the Atlantic but the book will officially be out in late July everywhere but if you pre-order

“now they will you'll get the first copy as he'll be here as we'll be with the first ship and”

that's the book so I'm really proud of what's the seal and I have created and I hope it moves

to be pulled away that it it it it affected me making the work certainly yeah well it certainly

“moved me and I've just seen a PDF so I can't wait to actually get in my hands trend thank you so”

much go and have a lovely evening with your family congratulations on another you know wonderful piece of work and just being who you are and and giving us such inspiration and wonderful arts in the world I know I appreciate it as well as the audience do so thank you and I hope to get you back on here another day with the next project as of thank you mad thank you for the thoughtful questions and and the way that you put this interview together is create happy me a chat