Trent Davis Bailey

Evergreen, CO
Portfolio

Trent Davis Bailey is an American photographer born and based in Colorado. His projects take a long view on memory, loss, family, and geography, particularly in relation to ecology, place, landscape, and time. Bailey’s work has been shown widely in the US and internationally, including exhibitions at the Denver Art Museum, the Fort Collins Museum of Art, Somerset House in London, and Robert Koch Gallery in San Francisco. It is held in the permanent collections of the Denver Art Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Photography, among others.

Project: Son Pictures
As a pictorial elegy contextualized within a decades deep family archive, Son Pictures combines made and found photographs, film stills, newspaper reportage, and premonitory drawings and paintings made by the artist’s mother. Initially seeking to memorialize and somehow reconcile with his mother’s tragic death in the 1989 crash of United Airlines Flight 232 in Sioux City, Iowa, Bailey’s intent for this work shifted greatly when thirty years later, in 2019, he himself became a father. Partly inspired by the mixtapes of his youth, this body of work spans generations and traverses genres, styles and sources to evoke a complicated yet vital family record. It’s a series that mimics grief, holding the possibility for the past to exist in the present and the present in the past. It took the artist a full decade to find his resolve with Son Pictures, which he describes as “a photographic memorial, an atlas of memory, and most importantly a revised family album.”