Trent Davis Bailey on Finding Family and Community Through Photography

The artist and photographer Trent Davis Bailey (our host, Spencer Bailey’s, identical twin brother) continually seeks to unearth the tangled roots of his identity through his intensely personal and place-based work. This summer, his first-ever solo museum exhibition, “Personal Geographies” (on view through February 11, 2024)—a photographic exploration of memory, family, and place—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 and present, some of which were recently published alongside 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” unpacks the loss of his mother, who died in a plane crash in 1989 when he was 3; his family’s attendant trauma and grief; and his present life, at 38, as a husband and parent of two toddlers.

On this episode—his and Spencer’s first formal “twinterview,” recorded last month on their 38th birthday—Bailey talks about what it was like to grow up as an identical twin, his unusual and decidedly dysfunctional upbringing, and photography as a device for commemoration.

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

[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

[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

[36:40] Rebecca Solnit

[45:43] United Airlines Flight 232

[45:46] Spencer Bailey Reflects on the Crash-Landing of United Airlines Flight 232

[45:56] Sioux City, Iowa

[46:02] Frances Lockwood Bailey

[56:42] International Center of Photography

[56:57] Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb

[59:55] Robert Frank “The Americans” Exhibition at the Met

[01:08:10] Lake Placid, New York

[01:14:24] Brooklyn Darkroom