About

Trent Davis Bailey draws from his personal history and photographic encounters as well as historical and archival research. His current and recent projects delve into idiosyncratic locales in America, from farms in Colorado to forests in Upstate New York, and emphasize the interrelationship of images and memory. Collectively his work responds to personal resonances of loss, trauma, family, and geography, particularly as they relate to ecology, place, memory, and time.

In his series The North Fork, Bailey looks to a remote river valley in western Colorado. A Colorado native himself, the artist was drawn to the vastness of his home state, its rich agrarian history, and the assorted characters who inhabit the Western Slope. He was especially curious about his extended family who used to live there — an aunt, uncle, and cousins — who he hadn’t seen in nearly 20 years. Describing his childhood memories of them, he says: “They lived in a large tent at the base of a mountain. Their backyard had three ponds and a garden where they grew their own food. Beyond that was a dense forest of scrub oak and juniper trees where I imagined coyotes, black bears, and mountain lions lurked.” Bailey marveled over his cousins’ world, but due to a falling out between his father and his uncle, he only visited the North Fork a few times as a child. In 2011, Bailey returned to the valley and for the next seven years he used photography to piece together his experience of the North Fork and its inhabitants. In due time, he not just found his extended family, but he rekindled ties with them while forging his own place within the local community. Then one fateful day, while foraging for mushrooms, he met his now wife with whom he has two children. Collectively, these photographs are informed by that backstory, but they also go well beyond it: conjuring up their own associations of place, food, kinship, and wonder.

Trent Davis Bailey received his MFA from the California College of the Arts, and his BFA in Photography and BA in Art History from the University of Colorado Boulder. He is the recipient of the Film Photo Award’s Spring 2019 New Project Award, the 2015 Snider Prize from the Museum of Contemporary Photography, and a 2014 Atlantic Philanthropies Grant awarded by the Magnum Foundation. He was an artist-in-residence at Brooklyn Darkroom in 2023 and at Anderson Ranch Arts Center in 2016. He has taught at numerous institutions, including in the photography programs at the California College of the Arts and the University of Colorado’s College of Arts and Media. His work has been exhibited internationally and is held in the permanent collections at the Denver Art Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, among others.