Cody Bratt
Member Spotlight - January 2020
Where did you grow up, and where do you live now? I'm very lucky to call myself a native Northern Californian. I grew up bouncing between the San Francisco Bay Area and a small Gold Rush ghost town named Fiddletown. We moved out there when I was nine years old, but my Dad ran a photoengraving shop in San Francisco so I would spend some of my summers there working. I moved back to the Bay Area permanently for college and I've been here ever since. I think this urban/rural dichotomy really opened my sense of observation and I probably owe my photographic process to it at some level.
Why did you join TPS, and how long have you been involved? I'm a recent TPS member! I learned about TPS through Review Santa Fe. I was impressed by the breadth of work from other TPS members and enjoy supporting organizations that help get more photographic work shared locally. Plus I've got a soft spot for Texas!
Why did you become a photographer, and where do you find inspiration or motivation for your work? In some ways, photography is in my DNA. Both my great-grandfather and my grandfather were both photographers. My grandfather's Hasselblad was one of my first cameras. And my Dad is a photoengraver, so I grew up around the smell of photographic chemicals. But I didn't get into making photographs until college. In a previous life, I was a freelance graphic designer, but when I went to college I wanted to branch out and I majored in Rhetoric. I needed a creative outlet, so I signed up for darkroom classes and started making night photographs.
As far as inspiration goes, I'm deeply inspired by music. I'm constantly listening to it when I'm making work, editing work or even just looking at others' work. While I was making my monograph, Love We Leave Behind, I ended up building a playlist as I found songs that fed the work, themes and narrative.
How would you describe your photography and/or working process? I guess I'd describe my work as open ended, narrative driven, cinematic and moody. Making work, I'm most often trying to capture an emotion or feeling more than some sort of factual representation. My working process varies. Usually I've got a rough idea of what I'm aiming for, but I don't spend too much time engineering the photograph. I really enjoy searching for the 'Angel of Uncertainty' as Sally Mann put it. Particularly when I'm working with people, I tend to let them inhabit the character and just see where we go. Recently, I've been working on a project rooted in mixed media and that's been expanding how I work considerably -- it tends to be a lot more raw and leads to a lot more surprises for me.
Please tell us about your most recent photographic work. I released my first monograph, Love We Leave Behind, last year. I sometimes describe it as my "ode to codependency." Most of the work here is from that series. The mixed media series I am working on is very new, utilizing my Great-Grandfather's photographic archive that I've been restoring and digitizing as the base. It doesn't even have a solid title yet, but it explores the multi-generational effects of family secrets through a mixed media process I'm applying to the base photographs. I'm really excited to see where it takes me.
