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 destroyedThe camera as a passport for a shy kid, and photography as a search for belongingWhy he hides many of his subjects' faces, and the 4-foot constraint that shaped The North ForkEditing 60 pictures down to 46 with Trespasser, and handing his grief to the right publisherRebecca Solnit's essay, walking as a way of seeing, and why "capture" is the wrong word for photographyWatching a Hollywood reenactment of the crash at 7 years old, and how cinema colonises memoryBecoming a father, and the New York Times op-ed that revealed what Son Pictures was really aboutHumor as an antidote to grief, and protecting play inside the heaviest workRobert Adams, reusing photographs across books, and what follows a decade-long projectFind Trent’s work here:https://trentdavisbailey.comhttps://www.instagram.com/trentdavisbailey/______________________________________________________Message me, leave a comment and join in the conversation!Support the showThank you for listening and for being a part of this incredible community. You can listen and watch full extended and ad-free episodes in my community - The MOOD Insiders - where I also share insights, photography tips and behind-the-scenes content on my channel as well as meet with the community on book club weekly events, special guest features, bonus content, open forum access, free resources and so much more. Join The Communityhttps://www.mattjacob.co/insidersMy Newsletterhttps://www.mattjacob.co/archiveWebsite:https://themoodpodcast.comSocials:IG | X | TikTok | Threads | YouTube | @mattyj_ay