From a young age I was taught to believe a journal is a “continuing record of meaningful experiences that affect our lives,” and that it was a commandment from God Himself to document my feelings as a way of deciphering His influence.1 Growing up in a high-demand religion so focused on archiving our divine existence perhaps forced me to find joy in recording life’s happenings, and photography consequently became a part of this undertaking.
In developing a conscious awareness of my religious lineage, however, I discovered many of the heroic figures I had received guidance from were devious, racist and misogynistic instigators of a colonial expansion on the American West. I then felt my camera became a much more significant tool, one that I could use to contextualize these revisionist histories through a more truthful, ethical perspective.
Having made these realizations through a deconstruction of my prescribed faith, I have used personal experience and familial research as a means to propel investigations of such patriarchal systems and broader Western exceptionalism. Thus, my work is conceptually drawn to religious and historical narratives and is visually manifested through both digital and analog post-documentary aesthetics.
A passion for literature has led me to find the sequencing of photographs is parallel to how a writer might sequence their words and, as a result, both efforts have become essential factors in my practice. In particular, John Steinbeck’s social criticisms and poetic constructions of fictional, yet representational settings of America’s economic disparities continue to inform how I perceive and compose the landscape.
My work originates from a fundamental aspect of photographic theory, to which critic Susan Sontag describes “[Photographs] depict an individual temperament, discovering itself through the camera’s cropping of reality.”2 As such, I find it to be a great privilege and responsibility to address these lesser-known organizational concerns through the lens of my camera, coincidentally fulfilling the journalistic integrity I was inherently commanded to wield.
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1 “Journals.” www.churchofjesuschrist.org, www.churchofesuschrist.org/study/manual/family-home-evening-resource-book/lesson-ideas/journals?lang=eng.
2 Sontag, Susan. On Photography. London, Allen Lane, 1977.
Contact
baileyprigby@gmail.com
@baileyrigbyphoto
Salt Lake City, UT
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