Cody Bratt was born and currently resides in San Francisco. He holds a Rhetoric degree with an emphasis in narrative and image from University of California, Berkeley. A fourth-generation photographic artist, his work spans several genres (landscape, portraits, experimental) and formats across both film and digital.
Themes of memory, emotion, identity and place occupy a prominent place in Cody’s work, utilizing both documentary and fictionalized narrative approaches. By blending these themes and approaches, he hopes to open ambiguity in the realness of the narrative to let the viewer inhabit the images. He’s known to take long drives in the middle of the night with way too many cameras searching for mysterious moments.
Love We Leave Behind, Cody’s debut monograph, is out in Fall 2017 from Fraction. Last year, LensCulture named him one of their Emerging 50 photographers in 2016. Cody’s photographs have been exhibited internationally including New York City, Berlin, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago and Brighton, England.
Love We Leave Behind
“Love We Leave Behind” is one part fiction and one part “emotional documentary.” The work explores the journey we undertake while breaking away from a sickly love that might be as damaging for us as it is intoxicating. The photographs aim away from literal specificity and towards ambiguity and fuzziness, both in their individual subject matter as well as their sequencing.
Consisting of two intertwined threads–landscapes and portraits–Love We Leave Behind merges two distinct image-making processes in order to render a cinematic and lyrical–but never reliably factual; a sense of memory, discovery, and loss at both the interior and exterior levels.
The series was a top finalist for the CDS/Honickman First Book Prize in Photography and is currently in production through Fraction Editions.
To view more of Cody’s work please visit his website. To pre-order “Love We Leave Behind”, please visit his store.