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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Transcript

Making Meaning

Trent 0:00

I was willing to let somebody tie me to a tree to make art using a camera. The work will reflect back at you while you're actually making it.

Matt 0:10

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.

Trent 0:30

I was trying to convince myself that I was making this documentary work about a farming community. No, this work is about something else. I was looking for my family, and I didn't want to admit that. And in the end, I ended up meeting my wife there.

Matt 0:59

So if you've ever fooled yourself about why you make your own work or haven't quite found a clear voice yet, this one is for you.

Trent 1:53

Thanks for having me, Matt.

Matt 1:56

Where do we start? I have been a fan for a very long time, ever since I stumbled um upon North Fork, which uh published by Trespasser, I think I can't even remember how I found it, but um maybe just through normal media distribution. But uh yeah, being a fan of a while. So I do want to talk about that as well as the 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 I understand that the camera and photography has been such an integral part of you since you were a boy. Um so I'm interested to hear like kind of how that's how how the camera has been kind of tethered to you since you were such a a young lad and it kind of found you and never really let go, I guess. So I'm wanting to understand if you you know know why and what kind of drew you really into the the the art of photography at such a young age.

Trent 2:54

Wow. I I wish I had a quick and easy answer for you there. But yeah, I I can say that I picked up my first camera when I was about 12 years old. Um, but prior to that, I had had a lot of fun with um just like point and shoot cameras in the 90s, uh disposable cameras with a plastic lens and um getting those back from the one-hour photo lab. Um, like many families, we had point and shoot cameras as well, um, which I I discovered as 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 of times before, but I'll share it again here for listeners who haven't heard it. Uh my older brother was a freshman in high school and had been assigned by his art teacher to take pictures and somehow included a rope, which is um very vague. Um, but in his own teenage way, I think he thought it would be fun to see about tying up his little brother, not in like a bondage way, but like, you know, like like not in the like I'm gonna constrain you and hold you down and take these pictures, more like uh, hey, how about I tie you to the tree in the backyard, which is what what he did. So we we did that, made a few pictures there, and then I think he shot like a roll of film and he goes inside and and leaves you there for five minutes. And I remember thinking, like, wow, the cat camera is a powerful tool because I was just willing to let somebody tie me to a tree to be 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. Like it enabled us as teenage brothers, or I wasn't quite a teenager yet, but it enabled us in this adolescent state to be imaginative, to pull from 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, unties me from the tree, and then he's like, What do you think about getting on top of dad's old Toyota Land Cruiser? And he's like, I could tie it, tie you down there and go for a ride around the block. And you know, um, I mean, this is it sort of sounds like it would be out of a movie. Like that, that uh that movie mid-90s, this is it. You know, that was me and my brother were were very much doing a mid-90s thing, and he put ski goggles on me and took more pictures, and we went for a ride around the block, um, and nobody sauced my knowledge. Uh, but it but it was hilarious. And um, I still remember these pictures quite well. Uh and then we had a flood in our basement, and the negatives and the prints were completely ruined uh from this be like basically being in two feet of a backed up toilet and it's unredeemable. Um, so in a way, it's almost better that those photographs don't exist. Okay. I don't know how to describe it better than this, but I'll I'll try. I think sometimes a story can be just as impactful as a photograph. I think sometimes if 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 of text and image when we get there. Um, but yeah, that's essentially that's essentially the origin story. And then literally the next week, I go to my dad, because my dad was away. Obviously, he wasn't home or 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 in college, and he had an old Nikon 35 millimeter camera with two or three lenses. And so I asked him if I could borrow it, and I just started taking photographs. Um, and it didn't stop.

Matt 7:49

Yeah, I mean, what a beautiful and this is if you didn't say, but uh, this is your twin brother. Are you the younger or older?

Trent 7:56

It was actually it was actually my older brother. He's two and a half years old. Yeah, and then I have I have a twin brother as well, who who I think my dad and him were somewhere, which is why I was the one that ended up being tied to the tree.

Matt 8:10

Okay, cool.

Trent 8:11

But yeah, we're gonna we're gonna work out in its own way, you know? And

The Camera As Social Passport

Trent 8:16

yeah. Um but I also think 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 I 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 weren't necessarily my friends. I would just see somebody with an interesting face and I'd ask them if I could take their portrait. And then they, of course, said yes because I was, they knew who I was. It wasn't a massive school. Um, but it allowed me to have these uh interactions that I never would have otherwise. And it's, you know, a lot of people talk about it as this sort of passport or this license to enter into these situations where you are either an outsider or you're seeking this sense of belonging. And I think photography is really good at that.

Matt 9:35

Photography is really good at that. And I am the just like you, it's uh it's funny you 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. Um, because it was I was always awkward in in that respect.

Building A Place To Belong

Matt 9:53

Sorry to cut away from the episode for a 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 serious about the work, you did it alone. You'd consume enough, watch enough, read enough, and eventually 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 insiders. It's a place where the work is taken seriously, where you can bring your questions and of course your half-finished ideas, and where someone will actually engage with them. We have the ad-free extended podcast episodes with bonus content. We have monthly masterclasses, QA sessions, and of course the weekly book clubs and direct sac 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.

When Photography Turns Inward

Matt 11:16

Fast forward into kind of your professional years and kind of uh adulthood, when did photography then I I'm not gonna ask you to pick a date, obviously, but roughly how 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.

Trent 11:43

Yeah, that's a great question. Yeah, I don't know the date. Sorry, Matt. Give a specific day, please. Yeah, no, I can speak to the process, and it was sort of an undoing. Um, I'm highly educated in photography, meaning I studied in middle school. I took photography classes in high school, I started in a business school at a large university in the states, and after a semester, applied to their art school as well, because I was at a large enough college where you know, or a university where there was the business college and you know, college of arts and sciences that had a BFA 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. And photography had been that for me in many ways. Um, and so 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. Um, I mean, there are undergrads that make really impressive projects and potentially lead and start their career there. That wasn't my experience. Um, I could look back at my undergrad work and uh it feels a little cringy, but like it's not in a not in a bad way. It's just not as well considered or realized. Yeah. Um, but I uh but I I think that I had from all of that teaching, I had I had or learning, I had all the teachers on my shoulder, and they're just kind of telling me what to do. And I had this knowledge and background in art history. I got an art history degree as an undergrad 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 think I can make it as an artist, or I think I'm gonna 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 the tradition of social documentary or something

North Fork And The Hidden Subject

Trent 14:23

like that. And I I think the North Fork 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 set in the mountains in the western part of my home state. And I acknowledged the home state part, but I wasn't, I was still trying to have this sort of objectivity. 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 intensely personal. And um I had to step back, and sometimes you're so in something um that if you let the world unfold around you as you're making pictures, it will reflect back at you why you're actually the work will reflect back at you why you're actually making it. Like the pictures are the best teachers. I think sometimes you learn 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, uh I I hope that answers your initial question.

Matt 16:05

Certainly, and it's it's definitely a a 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 why am I why am I making these types of images? Um and you mentioned North Fork. Let's let's talk about that quickly because um 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 it you didn't I presume you didn't realize that after seven years, but at 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 Fork, what was that specific intent? And what now, after you've published it, what would you say it's about?

Trent 17:10

Yeah, if I think back to my first trip to that valley. So this valley, the first time that I went there, I was seven years old, and it's this agrarian river valley in Colorado. My aunt and uncle and uh six of their children at the time uh 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. Um, it was not like totally uh, you know, nowadays it's a lifestyle back then. It was they were just doing it because they could save money and they were um on this sort of shared adventure together. And I grew up in the suburbs, southwest of 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. Um, we went two or three times, and then my dad and his older brother, they'd had a lot of disputes since teenage, they were teenagers, and it ultimately led to a falling out when there was a breach of 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 in my imagination. I just had these childhood memories of 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 like why I was why I even knew that this place existed. I yeah, you know, if I 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 it the stories my dad said were true. 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 been like get lost if I had told them, you know. So in a certain way, I became I became a part of this community. I essentially met a Vintner and orchardist who let me sleep on his land and he showed me around, and then I was met a sculptor who was house sitting on this ranch, and 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 at the San Francisco Art Institute. She had a guest house, she let me sleep in it, and that's how it evolved. Like I entered into this place knowing nobody and only having these memories of it, 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 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 um sort of what that place held for me, the mystery of it, the warmth of it, the intimacy of family, the strange and beautiful, colorful foods that my aunt grew, all of those things were um that she grew and prepared. She's a macrobiotic chef. All those things were like part of what I was trying to bring um into the work. I mean, if you if you're th if you equate it to music, it was like I knew what some of the notes were that I was trying to hit. Yeah. And I just had to riff for a while and find the right notes.

Matt 21:54

I love that analogy.

Trent 21:55

Yeah, so I just stayed in this place and I I hit a lot of bad 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 Norfolk. 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 Fort Collins, and Denver is right in the middle. And all of 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 been 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 Viny's land. And it's just the headlights of my car on this tall summer grass, and um some of the trees in the distance are coming up. But it's really, it evokes that sense of longing and nostalgia and search. And I I kind of love that that the last image in the book, most viewers wouldn't know this, is from this like one of the very first photos that I took. And there's sort of a poetry to that, even though that's it has more to do with the edit that I did with Trustfaster Than Anything. It wasn't necessarily something preconceived, or it doesn't really matter. But for me, that I I find some poetry in that. And then the other picture that I took that first trip was of that sculptor that I mentioned. And it was 5:30 in the morning, and I woke up on his sofa and I look, and he's standing there in the kitchen, and he's talking to his three cats. And one of them's outside the window, and he's just talking through a little crack in the window. And I, you know, rub my eyes, and it looks like this perfect painterly light, like orange-ish red light, first light of 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 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. Yeah, can you please just stay 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 and thinking about my uncle, who was this bearded man who always had this sense of mystery to me, this 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 isn't a picture of a member of this community, which is true. But now I would say, if if 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 it, 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, some were more amenable to being photographed than others, but I can genuinely say almost every single person that I spent time with considered 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. Um, and I 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 at a very specific period of time in my life when I had specific longings, desires that were directing the work subliminally or not. Like I 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 into local food co-op, and I I read about this in the back of the book. But there was a woman who gave me this uncanny feeling, and and sure enough, it was my aunt. And then the next day I met 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 were it not for photography, were it 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 this space to 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 pictures in that series do, is 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. Uh you can you can feel both, and and that's there's something special to that. You can feel the childlike wonder, but you can also feel an adult who is exploring genuine desires, you know, and and um 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 in 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 it drove the picture making, but the viewer doesn't need to know that. Yeah, 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 accessible medium. And I and I like that about it. I like that, well, especially nowadays, we're inundated with with imagery. So to make a photograph that makes somebody stop in their tracks and look is becoming increasingly harder. But it doesn't mean that you need to make a sensational photograph to do that. Yeah. And I think that's one of the 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 North Fork, and that's the beauty. Like I I love that. I don't want I don't want that that book to be leading the viewer, telling the viewer what to think about the pictures. It's it's everyone's allowed to have their own experience. And I yeah, I I I trust that's what it was for you when you found that book.

Matt 31:13

Yes, but now hearing you talk about it in person makes it even more rich, I think, if if that's possible. Um, you talk about the last image in the book, which is my favorite image. Um, 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 from that image, that that feeling of desire and searching for something, but also that feeling of uh nostalgia and memory and kind of uncertainty, what's next. And it's you know how how amazing that one image can evoke so many emotions like that and and thoughts and um perspectives. And the whole book just does that from from page to page. There's this playfulness, there's the warmth throughout the book. Um you know, you've answered so many questions by that I had by talking about it. This this um this root of your of the book in in desire for for family or at least family connection and understanding where your place within the family might be and just remembrance, you know, uh 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 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 only 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, you know, beautiful moments of being in a field and eating fresh fruit, or seeing your granddad or your uncle, you know, talk to animals or whatever they're doing in the kitchen, right? All 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 layers to it.

Trent 33:16

Hearing that description too, you know, I think I will I one one thing I was really trying to avoid was having the work be too too saccharin or sugarcoated, you know, like or pucolic, which it 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 a perfect family story. There was this, you know, the breaking apart of family ties in a way that um 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 uh the struggles that my own family had had gone through and really wanting to make amends or or find this sense of reproachment.

Matt 34:19

And yeah, I think uh desire for you know the the reparations from estrangement, right?

Trent 34:26

Yes, and it and it happened, and and you know, and the work it brought it it happened and it brought me there, but in the end, I also had these boxes of time boxes of negatives that tell their own

Editing North Fork Into A Book

Trent 34:42

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 trespasser, 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 edit, winnowed it down to I think about 45, 46 pictures, and then looked at contact sheets and identified two photos that I had never even printed before, and then brought that into the work. And they were notes that needed to happen in the project. Um, 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 photographs are. And then I had to find somebody that knew how to master them in the right way. And these two, well, the the team at Trespassum 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 it it needed to find the right balance between all of 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, uh, who's based in Frankfurt, 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 I'm about to release my second book, and in both cases, I wouldn't change a thing. And I don't know how many photographers can say that, but I 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 Son Pictures.

Finding Your Voice Beyond Technique

Matt 37:25

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 a body, a voice, and a brand that actually gets noticed. It's not a course, it's just the thing I always wished I'd 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.

Why Faces Stay Partly Unseen

Matt 39:17

When I first read North Fork or first saw North Fork, I noticed that um a lot of the people in the images, in fact, I think all of them, we don't see the full face. And I I love that there's almost like a motif as well as you know, um uh people lying down uh whether whatever position they're in, like screens and scrims, kind of these beautiful little motifs that run through the book. Um and but especially with the people and the portraits, is this a an intentional technique or what do you kind of read into that uh kind of way of displaying people?

Trent 39:54

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.

Matt 40:02

So okay, tell to talk to me about that choice, that deliberate choice then with you and Matthew O'Brien.

Trent 40:08

Yeah, well, some of the in large part of that was already part of the language that I brought to the project and brought to them. Um, but we stuck with it. And there are, you know, there are there are certainly images where you can see their face. Um, but yeah, I uh it also probably has to do with the camera that I was using, which was a medium format rangefinder, and I couldn't shoot closer than four feet. Um, I couldn't get anything in focus closer than four feet. So I'm I'm I'm seeking in the process of making that work, I was seeking to make intimate photographs. Right. And yet I was constrained by the fact that I couldn't get closer than four feet to something. So I'm trying to make this sense of intimacy. And I think having that constraint actually helped create some of the language of the project. Um and it also led me back to the way that I was making pictures. And and um, you know, I can think of this picture that I took of these two sisters, Izzy and Cece, and I I spent an entire morning and early 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 at a certain point, um, I'm taking this portrait of the younger sister Cece leaning against this platform white wall, and her older sister Izzy starts climbing this rope right behind me, and she keeps climbing it, and then all of a sudden her shadow is directly above image, yeah. See above Cece. 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 otherwise. Yeah, but their parents were good with it, they wanted photos of their daughters, and and they knew why I was there, and I knew why I was there, and I had all this intention, good intention. And I'm take I take took these pictures of of Cece and Izzy's shadow was changing, and she's leaning back and just playing around, swinging on this rope. And I took these pictures of Cece, and most of them she's just looking directly, she's looking directly back at the lens. And after a certain one, I advanced the film, click, click, and she puts her hands over her eyes um because the Son was too intense. But what I didn't didn't know at the time was she had painted each of her fingernails at different, like alternating colors, and she had 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 hadn't told her to put her hand 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. Um and I knew that it kind of got at that everyday moment as a child, it feels like a dream or this yeah, 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. Um, there's like a way in or through. Um, obviously, like one of the more iconic well. Known images is of Taryn, who's the farmhand with the blonde hair and her head's turned. Um, and I didn't foresee that picture coming either. And it has its own story and it happened in its own way and has its own connotations. Uh, a lot of people think she's pregnant in the photo, and that's great for me. Like, I like that people read into these pictures and find meaning through gestures. It's how throughout the history of portraiture, we look at what that the way that painters in the Renaissance placed their subjects' hands. Like what they're 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 and how we view the image and how we read into it, and how we unhow we uh impose our own story line on it.

Rebecca Solnit On Traces And Seeing

Matt 45:10

Uh wonder wonderfully explained. And there's there's this visual language that you're so good at in this book. But when it comes to language, another thing that I think is so um respected in the book is the essay by Rebecca Solnet. And I know she's had uh a big impact uh on you, and I only know that because I listened to your podcast with your 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 uh you know given you a different insight with regards to photography itself that maybe you hadn't you know understood or experienced?

Trent 45:50

Sure. It's funny to say I literally have one of her more recent books right next to me, uh, which is called No Straight Road Takes You There, Essays for Uneven Terrain, which is uh a beautiful title and subtitle for the times we're living in that are there's just so much uncertainty in the world right now. And 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 uh toxic masculinism. Like 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 it through a lens that's generous and compassionate and giving. And um she ununderstandably has uh an interest in the socio-political, but 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. Uh she's also written on the subject of walking, which one could argue photography and walking have a lot in common. Um, and the way in the pace of walking allows for a specific type of looking, which is, I think, supported also by photography. Um, like I th 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 certainly, I'm 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 greater terrain on a bike or in a car. But I also think there's something to be said for noticing the smaller things uh and walking and being at that pace. And she wrote this book called Wanderlust. And when I teach introduction to photography, I always have these intro students read the first chapter, which is called Tracing a Headland. Uh, the headlands are in Marine County in the Bay Area, and it's it's this old, there's this old military presence that if you look closely, it's kind of buried in the hills. Uh but there, but a lot of people just go there to recreate. There's great trails. Like I hope everybody in their lifetime gets the hike on the Dipsy Trail. It's just an un unbelievable trail. But this essay, whether or not you've been there, you read it and it it talks about the act of going from heel to toe. It gets really granular into like the uh the feeling of walking and then the feeling of perception, and then understanding the layers of history in the landscape and how to detect that. And I always come back after these students have read it, and I said, Why do you think I gave you this essay 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. Like there are I think to watch a film or listen to a good, a good comp like an amazing album start to finish, and understanding, understanding sequencing, both film and music are are perhaps more explored in terms of thinking 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 in undergrad. And um, you know, that was about 20 years ago, so I'm dating myself a little bit. And I think uh it's evolving, photography is evolving, the form of the photo book is evolving, and that's exciting, you know. Uh I think I think that's uh a great thing. Um I hope that's not too wrangling an answer, but yeah, I met Rebecca Solna 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. Uh, and she and her essay in my book is no exception. It essentially a lot of people read it and they're like, why is there no mention of Trent to this book? 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 its uses and abuses, and uh even some of the analogies of 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 it's about possession and um and and that's a sort of a misuse of photography. And um she writes beautifully about how like a lot of the pictures are at a slant where I'm looking at things indirectly and how that can actually be a more honest way of 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 the essay, 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. Um, I had photographed her for a editorial assignment for the New York Times style magazine, T magazine, uh in 2017, and that's how we first met. So I have her email address and I sent her the edit and sequence that I made with Brian and Matthew. And uh I think she got back to me in a day saying, Yes, I'll I'll do this. That's wonderful. Um, and it was it was great, but she's also an 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 is is wonderful. She took uh a cue 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 the 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 um all of her explanation in the first 80% of the essay is in long dusty road, up to the pictures. Uh, 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 uh 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 in the book, um, but she did that. So um now I've read that.

Matt 54:02

Well, yeah, and thank you for introducing me to her through the Northwark book. Uh it's um she adds the cherry on top uh for sure during 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 Sun Pictures. Um, and I 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 as solid objects, 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 drew in the dust, you see the shadows of the birds passing overhead, the wear of feet on the steps or hands on the tool, or just how something is far from new by all the cracks or fading or fraying. Like search and rescue teams, we learn to read traces of what passed by. I think that's a a wonderful paragraph, uh and so well written, and like you said, tying even though that's a paragraph in the in the longer essay, it still ties in and she just kind of sums it up uh with a beautiful sentence at the end. And I feel like now kind of knowing your story more and um having had uh the privilege of of seeing the images in your new book and and the layout and the text that you add with with that, and we're gonna 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

Son Pictures And Flight 232

Matt 56:14

can can you give me you know maybe a response to that, but as you do an overview of Sun pictures and what this this incredibly powerful and um emotional project that you've been working on uh over the last few years?

Trent 56:31

Wow. That I I hadn't read the essay in a while, and that those words are it it it really gets at the texture of what that book is um in such an in such a summed up kind of way that I could I could have never done myself. Uh yeah, so Sun 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 to Boston. But on that flight from Denver to Chicago, the rear fan disc in the rear engine had a hairline fracture of a crack. Uh literally minuscule little crack in this mismanufactured fan disc. Uh and the that crack reached its uh critical stress level essentially and exploded somewhere over Iowa, and it took out all of the plane's hydraulics, and the plane managed to stay in the air for another 41 minutes, could pretty much only turn in one direction. It managed to make one big looping left turn, I believe, and then uh essentially lined up with a runway in Sioux City, Iowa at Sioux Gateway Airport, and missed the runway by a few feet, the front wheel dug into the ground, uh, and the plane crash landed. Now, the miracle of that day is more than half the passengers on board and almost all of the flight personnel and everybody in the cop get 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, uh, certainly in the decade afterwards. And in that time, it I essentially felt because I wasn't on on the plane, that everything that my two brothers was were dealing with, who both sustained quite critical physical injuries, uh they their problems were more important than mine, or that's how I viewed it. And so um I think in a way, when you when you start a project, I didn't know that that was really what I was grappling with, but it was sort of like, what is my story here? How does this event, how can I share my side of this experience? Um, and how can I come to terms with the fact that I'm never gonna really know who my mom was or have an active relationship with her. And in certain ways, this project enabled me to do that. It enabled me to look at the art that she made when she was alive. It made me look back at photos that 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 there are about five premonitory artworks that my mom made. She was a very talented printmaker, and her mom fastidiously saved her artwork over the years. And so I have these drawings that she made as a little girl, one of which is called the big drop. And it literally looks like a plane coming in for a crash landing or a flight path profile. Yeah. Uh, another one is called Fire, and it's just a flame and it says fire above it in watercolor. Uh, another one, she painted a watercolor of uh sunset or sunrise on um the lake in which she grew up. I guess uh, and the way I found it, it was upside down and it looked like smoke coming out of 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 her last name in 1963 in 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 and I think I knew that that that particular piece needed to be in the in the work somehow. Um, and then she did this sort of Edward Munch inspired scream image of these faces disappearing and receding in a line, and they all seem to be singing or screaming. You're not quite sure, but it's uncanny when you place it in the context of a plane crash. Now, all of that is to say that it's very sorrowful and dark and and gloomy, and there are those elements in the work, and that 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 an adult and I felt I was in this safe place to do so about a decade ago. I was in a, it was a a year into being in a relationship with my now wife Emma. And I think partly because of that, I I felt safe to to go into this uh kind of darker side of my past and just see what it might turn up, what what might turn up uh through these creative acts with a candle, uh 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. Um, I never would have started this project if they had felt uneasy about it. Uh that's really important to me. Um, and now that I've made the book, my twin brother, who is a writer and an editor, um, his name's Spencer Bailey, and he has a great podcast called Time Sensitive. Good plug.

Matt 1:03:51

Good plug. Yeah, good plug.

Trent 1:03:53

We we we have a great way.

Matt 1:03:55

It is a great podcast, by the way. It is a personal big episode now. He's he's very, very good.

Trent 1:04:00

Yeah. Um, but as that's an aside, he wrote a essay in that really reflects his knowledge and understanding of the story of which he is a part, but also as a writer who has done a great deal of work thinking about memorials and memorialization, and I think photography and memorialization are very intertwined.

Archives, Memorials And Editorial Distance

Trent 1:04:29

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 uh, you know, a moment in which there is all of this action, it can be a quiet moment that can speak to action having happened before, or it can speak to uh time passing. And uh memorials, I think, do that in a really interesting way. And I I kind of get at that in uh 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 Venn diagram there. All of these things can kind of coexist. Um, 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. In fact, most of them didn't. 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 memento, if you want to call it that, or this engraving in time. And I think that that those moments, the they can feel very different than how in the moment than how they feel as a photograph after the fact. And if I and if I went into the if I went in and started editing and trying to decide which picture, 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 nearly impossible that that form of editing, of being a little bit more objective. And uh I really leaned on Cecile, one of the co-founders of Chose Commune, the publisher who who's making the book, who's putting it out. Um, 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 and photographic language and understands photography books better than almost anybody. And and so and so to have somebody like that that is very learned but not emotionally attached to the work helped me get past that hurryball. Like I got very close, and similar to my experience with trust crossing, I brought her a sizable edit and then a a folder of B-sides, and she made sense of it all and re-presented it to me. And we made a few slight changes, but it's very close to that first edit that she sent me. And at that moment, I knew I was working with the right person for this project.

Choosing Slow Work Over Algorithms

Matt 1:09:37

Which is which is so so important when you're 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 when you take your time is categorically different from the work you make when you're chasing the feed, maybe, or chasing the algorithm. Now, the mood insiders 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 QA's. We have the podcast, of course, but ad-free with bonus content, and we have direct access to me and 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

Fatherhood And Changing The Story

Matt 1:11:02

I'm I want to um 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 in able to um process its publication essentially. And I wanted to read, I mean, the text in the book is is so wonderful. And I I 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, certainly this book. And I want to read a little bit uh of an excerpt because I think it will kind of lead to the question that I I've just asked you in terms of like the purpose, the real intent, and the 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? How have do you feel I mean, being three years old when your mum passes away, I guess like there's lit there's obviously limited conscious memory of her, but being in your blood and being the closest family member you ever had, like the the grieving is so visceral, but it must have been really difficult to uh attach that grieving to s to something because you didn't have so many memories of her. So, how has that been 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 to really make that relationship something, or some kind of material fashion?

Trent 1:12:58

Yeah, I mean, like I said earlier, I don't feel like I know her, or I have a sense, a greater sense of her, maybe necessarily than when I started the project, but I I like the idea of of under of trying to understand her. That limited relationship offers space for creativity. It offered space for making work that is in dialogue with a an idea of a shared lived experience. Um I also think, yeah, like I had gone to where she grew up, which is where she's buried, and I that uh little excerpt really speaks to what I was just talking about of feeling something. I I think I have this expectation of how I might feel standing in front of her gravestone. 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 I, and and that's very true in 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 in in the Adirondats in upstate New York, by becoming the father, which when I started the project, the working title was Sun Pictures. I've been calling it that, and that's S-O-N Pictures, not S-U-N. It is sort of a cheeky reference to Henry Fox Talbot's Sun Pictures from Northern Scotland, which is one of the first photo books of all time. But I I I like the idea that the work started with me thinking 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 had a son arrive in this world. And I instinctively just started photographing and not necessarily thinking that it was going to be part of the project, but I photographed her throughout that pregnancy and I photographed the kid. And it's just as one does, the photographer in in their right mind uh would do that. It's it's that bearing witness. It's it's it's trying, it's 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 well. And it's making these moments tangible uh in a in a 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. 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'll go back to that analogy. It's just trying to see what feels right in each moment, and then make sense of it after the fact and kind of mash it together in a way that uh that that gets that hits those notes and gets at the emotive experience of being in this sentient body of of being my mother's son, of being a father. And I I didn't want to acknowledge it. And and then um in 2023, right at the beginning of the year, I shared some of the pictures with Jesse Wender, who's 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 do a preview of this project on Father's Day. And my knee-jerk was forums was Father's Day, why not Mother's Day? And I remember Jackie emails me back and says, This fork is about you becoming a father. I 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 we had worked together at California Sunday magazine. We had a history, but she um 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. And we came up with a list of people, my twin brother included, but I also had already asked him, like, hey, this is gonna become a book and I want you to write an essay. And um, and then and that feels perhaps a little more lasting because it's this physical object that uh, you know, isn't just uh gonna be in a digital archive or printed on museprint. It's it's this thing, you know? Um, 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 said, I think it needs to be me. And I had never written, I had never given myself permission to write. That was my twin brother's terrain. And when you have a twin, there's very often this dynamic of not wanting to step on each other's toes. And 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'd learned he learned how to make good photographs by watching me work, which I that's a nice compliment. But I, you know, I 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 the New York Times. And that was uh definitely a fire under my butt. But I also like knew that I I knew that I could do it. I I felt that I could do it. And then when that op-ed, it's called What Her Motherless Son Knows About Fatherhood, but also a title that I did not come up with. Uh, the right, the the editor did, and and and it felt too confident for me, that title. But then when I read the piece, I said, Oh, I guess I do know, I do know something. And I think I think it's it's 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 uh, you know, it's like I like the uh the analogy of like a photographer as a squirrel. Like you go out, you collect your acorns, you 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. Um maybe some of them are duds, but inevitably you're gonna have something that you can make meaning out of. And I and and I like that idea of um not forcing meaning on the work, but maybe it the work being where you find the meaning, if that makes sense. Like it's uh like why would you make the work if you already knew what you were going to do?

Matt 1:22:03

Yeah, it's an explorative, you know, uh process. Intuitive, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, we've 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 sit 10, 20, 30 minutes just watching the noise inside my head do what noise does. It hasn't just made me calmer 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 clearness 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've 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, is 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 reshapes my work, there's also a piece linked through my Substack page called There's No Self-Development Without Self-Awareness. Anyway, hope you enjoy. Thanks for listening. And

A Blueprint For Grief With Humour

Matt 1:24:26

um what what do you hope that viewers get from this book? Because it's such a personal you know, exploratory uh, you know, object essentially that you've you've pieced together, like you 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 catharcism 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? It's what do you or or is it or is it in in that aspect? What do you hope that viewers will will get from this book?

Trent 1:25:09

Yeah, I view the book as it's in part this atlas 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 looked to family archive to already found an existing images that were in my family archive that were in this archive of a newspaper in in Sioux City, Iowa, that were taken by these three photojournalists that photographed the incoming of the plane, the crash, and its aftermath. You can look at um the way in which cinema shapes memory. There was a movie reenactment of the crash that I watched at seven years old, live on ABC TV, and Charlton Hesson plays the captain of the plane, and I remember watching, literally having a cockpit view of this event, which, you know, at the time I I didn't fully it didn't fully register exactly what had 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 photojournalism, and I kind of weave all those things together to show that grief is always with us. So those are the archival elements, and then I've been making pictures with a large format camera, a medium format camera, a point and sheet camera, and I'm working with all of those different formats in different ways. Um, 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 nonlinear. 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 as 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 it uh a still from a Hollywood movie, um, and how it's all related in this um and kind of mixed up in this stew of memory. Um 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 2020 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 like a um sort of documentary, photojournalistic, gritty 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 I'd never seen before, and I realized that my mom was really artful and poetic and lyrical 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 is a photo, a self-portrait of her uh in her garden in Breckenridge, Colorado, and she they planted some poppies, and she's just it's her shadow with these poppies and her shadows making this beautiful shake. And there's all these pictures in the Norfolk of shadows and plants. Um it's it it was an 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 um she was really into gardening, and my my wife and I do a lot of that here, and we've been sowing all these seeds and uh this past week, and I'm just thinking of like that right now, in terms of working on a project. And when 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 your 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. Yeah. You know, so my time spent in the garden will hopefully and with enough water and concentration and and care will yield something. It's the same with a camera. I go out in the world and I 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, or hopefully me too.

Matt 1:31:52

You know, as much as there is um, you know, the the pathos in in the book, it there's definitely a uh you know um an undercurrent of hope and uh you know c connection with other people that might have maybe not had similar experiences but are struggling with grief and might be able to um 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 has the project has the the photography side of this project and and going back into the archives and just the this whole process which is fascinating to me when you're kind of piecing this montage of a of a book together, do you feel like it has actually healed anything in you or do you or or has it just given the wound somewhere else to live that that would be a boy Yeah.

Trent 1:32:42

No, I think with 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 um it it's not it's not that I've ever let go of anything, but I do think that I've uh 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 moments where you'll be turning, you'll 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 might echo it in some way and make you laugh out loud. And I'm good with that because humor is an 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 is this book is an opportunity for me to borrow some of that language that I learned from him in a visual way, of course. Um 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 instead, it gives the viewer a look inside my brain, you know. It it allows 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 unified thing 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 a, he was probably two and a half at the time, uh, and he's having a conversation with a corn on the cob. And it's just like this this corn on the cob, and the the light is behind him, and his shadow is cast on the corn on the cob, and he's talking to it and pointing at it, but it's also like framed right inside the shadow of his head, and it's one of those photographic moments that feels too perfect in a certain way. Like I didn't orchestrate it, it was just occurring 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 of the plane crash was that survivors were literally walking out of shoulder-high corn, July corn, and they had a hard time finding everybody um lost in this cornfield. And anytime that I go to a corn maze or eat corn on the cob, or you know, I can't not think of Iowa. I can't not think of Flight 232 at the crash. And that is something that I was aware of, and I didn't go out seeking, like, okay, I'm gonna use this as a prop and make a picture. It's just record in the summertime, and that happened, and it's in my archive, and I pulled from it, and there was a lot of play in terms of creating an edit for the book, and I think play and humor and curiosity and imagination are what make any photographer stronger. You can make work about the dark stuff and the hard stuff, but don't negate play, humor, imagination, curiosity.

Matt 1:37:25

I'd go one step further with the book. I you know, looking through the book multiple times now in in PDF 4, I can't wait to get my hands on it when it when it is released, but um it it's it's love. There's there's so much kind of um uh desire to find a place to put your love for this woman, but also love in the res love can exist in the the dark times more than anything. So, you know, that you're talking about kind of the the contrast between some of the pi images that you've put next to each other, and you know, I'm I'm looking at one right now, and one that I think is I 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's headlight, and it's one of just love and wonder and and uh exploration next to Yeah, go ahead. Next to an image of one of the aircraft seats after the crash, right? And there is there is uh curiosity in that, but putting those images next to each other just is so powerful, and um that's why I I I think it works. But yeah, please go and please explain that image.

Trent 1:38:37

I think is it the 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.

Matt 1:39:06

Ah, okay.

Trent 1:39:07

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. Um, I think the last line 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 I've I've realized this book, and it's sort of closing this circ, the circle, um, 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 and I were at the time of the crash. And so I think in a way, if I were looking for a literal reason why this project is complete, I would say that is it. And, you know, I'm I'm a a dad and a photographer, and they keep photographing my family, and that might turn into other projects, and I'm gonna keep exploring subjects that interest me and following leads, uh, and not in the following leads in an editorial sense, following leads in the intuitive sense. Allowing one picture to lead me to the next, or one lived experience to lead me to the next. And I don't know, maybe I'll work, maybe I'll find a way to work on a project that takes less than a decade. I hope so. I hope so. Uh I do have an offshoot project that is um is is coming out of some pictures that didn't make it into some pictures, but that I made 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 one of my favorite photographers, Robert Adams, he has pictures that exist in multiple books. Like he'll have he'll he'll republish the same 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 of 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 hand it over to a publisher, it's in their hands, and and knowing that is really important. Um, 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 a wide range of images and make it feel cohesive.

Balloon Letters And Who It's For

Matt 1:43:21

Trent, I'm gonna end with a a passage from the book that you wrote because I feel um it gets my goosebumps going, and I feel like it's a nice way to end and 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 airmail in envelopes tried uh tied 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 disappeared. Extremely moving words. And I feel I mean c 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 home to put this book into people's hands as kind of a love letter to your mum.

Trent 1:44:41

Yeah. A question that I'm often asked, photographers are often asked when you're 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 it and realized that it was about me becoming a dad, too. I was making these photographs for my mom.

Matt 1:45:13

Yeah.

Trent 1:45:15

And you know, I I think it's great that you picked up on that because you know, I could technically tie the book to some balloons and send it off, you know. Um yeah.

Matt 1:45:27

Well, um, with that, Trent, uh, I you know, we land on a hopeful, loving, and and and beautiful note. Thank you so much for being over time actually on Memorial Day in the US. Thank you so much for spending the time with me. And uh good luck with the book. Tell us a little bit about uh when it's coming out, where we can find it, when we can order it.

Pre-Orders, Release Dates And Closing Remarks

Trent 1:45:48

It's actually available for pre-order right now on Chose Commune's website, which I believe is just chosecommune.com. And um the book is called Sun Pictures. It comes out worldwide or ships from Europe and uh everywhere but the US in mid to late June. And then mid-July, it will be shipping in the US. Uh the books just take a little bit longer to get here uh because they're crossing the Atlantic. But the book will officially be out in uh late July everywhere. Um but if you pre-order now, they will you'll get the first copies. You'll be yours will be with the the first shit notes of the book. So um I'm really proud of what what Cecile and I have created, and um I hope it it moves people the way that it uh it affected me making the work, certainly.

Matt 1:46:49

Yeah. Well, it certainly moved me, and I've just seen a PDF, so I can't wait to actually get it in my hands. Trent, thank you so much. Go and have a lovely evening uh with your family. Um congratulations on uh on another you know wonderful piece of work and and just being who you are and and giving us such inspiration and and wonderful art in the world. Uh I know I appreciate it as well as the audience do. So thank you, and I hope to um get you back on here another day with your next project.

Trent 1:47:16

I I love that. Thank you, Matt. Thank you for the thoughtful questions and and the way that you put this interview together. It was great having a chat.