Review and words by Stephen Ross Goldstein, images courtesy of Trent Davis Bailey and Trespasser Books.

I was just 4 years old when I had my first experience with the outdoors. My Dad took me on a hike at Thumb Butte in Prescott, Arizona. This is one of my earliest memories. I remember reaching the summit and looking up at my Dad taking a drink of water with the pine and oak trees whistling in the wind. The pine forests in Arizona have a distinct smell, but you can’t quite put a finger on it if you’re not there. When I looked at Trent Davis Bailey’s The North Fork for the first time, I was transcended. It was as though, through this one photobook, I entered a portal where I could smell those pine trees and hear the wind whistling through the forest without actually being there.

Trent Davis Bailey’s The North Fork is a project that’s rooted in the warmth of childhood memories visiting an aunt, uncle, and cousins who lived off-the-grid in a remote corner of Colorado’s Western Slope and it looks to that landscape his family inhabited, the farmers and ranchers there today, the animals they raise, and the food they forage and grow. I look at Bailey’s photo of a horse in the landscape and the speckled wet glass in front of the sunflower patch, I see my own origin story. I see myself as a child staring out the backseat window of my parents car looking at the vast American Southwest landscape, wondering what is out there. Wondering who is out there. Bailey makes the people and the rural Colorado landscape of The North Fork his world and we can feel the familial connection flipping from page to page and the beauty that mystifies this work.

He states in the back of the book, “For me, the North Fork is also a conspicuous place in my imagination”. The second I saw Bailey’s pictures I knew they were special. His pictures are imaginative, tender and have a keen sensibility no matter what subject is in front of his lens. Describing his personal relationship to the North Fork, Bailey notes, “My first trip to the region was in 1992, when I was seven years old. My dad brought me there to meet my aunt and uncle, and their seven kids, who were then living 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”. When I read these words, I instantly thought of the movie ‘Captain Fantastic’ (2016). A movie about a couple and their six children who live deep in the wilderness of Washington State. At the time I first saw this movie and first looked at Bailey’s work, I was beginning to have an underlying thesis of escapism in my own photographic work. I knew I was not alone.

Towards the beginning of the book you see a person silhouetted with an animal in golden light, a theme Bailey plays upon in the pictures that come later in the book. A sincerity we don’t see often with photographers today.

I have a distinct memory from my childhood of my parents telling me I was very observant. Perhaps this is also part of my photographic origin story. I was reminded of this comment my parents made when I saw how the shadows in some of Bailey’s pictures affected me, they held me to a particular place in time, a time I remembered first wondering, “Who lives in that house at the end of the dirt road in the woods?” The book has a paper-over-board slipcase, with a softcover with thread-stitched signatures and rough linen, a compliment to the cultivated and earthly paradisal setting that proceeds on the opening pages. You don’t know exactly what you’re looking at, but you can’t look away. The light can’t be replicated, but it can only be dreamed of.

The sprinkler in the sun, the person picking citrus, the staged mushrooms on a tree, a man daydreaming in a slanted shaft of Colorado sun and the blue hour light on the meadow are distant on the pages, but feel all connected to the human instincts of wandering in the natural world. Obviously, many of Bailey’s photographs caught my eye in the book and in the moment, but one particular photograph stopped me in my tracks. 

Towards the second half of the book, we see an aging man climbing up the branches of what appears to be an aspen tree, maybe a cottonwood. Shimmering in radiant afternoon light, the golden leaves and the human figure amidst them just strike you. I lived in Northern Arizona for a portion of my life, a portion which I call the “beginning of my photographic coming of age”. I remember walking in the aspen trees, looking up, thinking of what could have been and what is next. Maybe the atmospheric meadows, farmers, weaving fire roads and sunset mushroom foraging in The North Fork can be fond memories for you, just as it has been for me. Never would I have imagined as a 4 year old boy, now more than two decades later I would be standing on top of Thumb Butte, once again…

The North Fork, 2023 by Trent Davis Bailey is published by Trespasser Books. A beautiful independent art book publisher with brilliant minds based out of Texas. 

Trent Davis Bailey is an American photographer born and based in Colorado. His work responds to personal resonances of loss, trauma, family, and geography, particularly as they relate to ecology, place, memory, and time. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including a 2019 Film Photo Award and the 2015 Snider Prize from the Museum of Contemporary Photography. Bailey’s work has been shown widely in the US and abroad, and it has been the subject of exhibitions at the Denver Art Museum, Somerset House in London, Robert Koch Gallery in San Francisco, Econtros da Imagem in Portugal, and elsewhere. Bailey holds an MFA from the California College of the Arts and a BFA and BA from the University of Colorado Boulder.