Trent Davis Bailey on Finding Family and Community Through Photography

In 1989, a month before his fourth birthday, the artist and photographer Trent Davis Bailey (our host, Spencer Bailey’s, identical twin brother) lost his mother in the crash-landing of United Airlines Flight 232 in Sioux City, Iowa. Now 38 and a husband and father, Bailey is at work on “Son Pictures,” an ongoing series of photographs piecing together fragments of his family’s past, including details of his mother’s life and the relationship he was never able to develop with her. Leading him to take deep-dives into newspaper and family photo archives, and from Colorado to Iowa to the Adirondacks, the project serves as a microcosm of Bailey’s intensely personal and place-based body of work, which continually seeks to unearth the tangled roots of his identity. This summer, Bailey’s first-ever solo museum exhibition, “Personal Geographies,” opened at the Denver Art Museum, and this fall he will release the corresponding project, “The North Fork,” in book form. Bailey is also currently at work on “Son Pictures,” an ongoing series of photographs piecing together fragments of his family’s past, part of which was recently published as a New York Times op-ed titled “What a Motherless Son Knows About Fatherhood.” Leading him to take deep-dives into newspaper and family photo archives, and from Colorado to Iowa to the Adirondacks, “Son Pictures” On this episode—his and Spencer’s first formal “twinterview,” recorded on their 38th birthday—Bailey talks about what it was like to grow up as an identical twin; his unusual and decidedly dysfunctional upbringing; photography as a device for commemoration; and his deep pictorial explorations of the climates, geographies, and landscapes of the American West.Special thanks to our Season 8 sponsor, Van Cleef & Arpels.Show notes: [00:28] Trent Davis Bailey[09:58] “The North Fork” [10:02] “Personal Geographies” at the Denver Art Museum[10:12] “What a Motherless Son Knows About Fatherhood” [10:18] “Son Pictures”[11:54] Paonia, Colorado[17:37] Elsewhere Studios[20:10] California College of the Arts[20:22] Museum of Contemporary Photography’s Snider Prize[20:28] Robert Koch Gallery[22:34] The Sublime[22:38] Shaun O’Dell[23:52] The Hotchkiss Crawford Historical Museum/Society[26:42] Robert Frank[26:53] Stephen Shore[26:55] Joel Sternfeld[28:27] “A Kingdom From Dust”[28:32] The California Sunday Magazine[28:36] Stewart Resnick[28:49] “