Show Preview | Cody S. Brothers - Southwest Art Magazine

Santa Fe, NM
Modernist Frontier, June 17-July 10

Cody S. Brothers, Lamy, Disappearing Train, photograph, 24 x 48.

This story was featured in the May 2020 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Get the Southwest Art May 2020 print issue or digital download now–then subscribe to Southwest Art and never miss another story.

ONE OF Cody S. Brothers’ many passionate photography projects centers on one of the most basic yet tricky picture-making machines around: the pinhole camera. With its tiny aperture, the light-proof box requires prolonged exposure times at precise calculations to achieve a successful shot, but for Brothers—a seasoned photographer with a keen devotion to analog film—the pains required are worth it. After spending a decade perfecting his pinhole-photography craft, he recently produced a striking tour de force in LAMY, DISAPPEARING TRAIN, a pinhole image he captured at an Amtrak station near his Santa Fe, NM, hometown. “That’s part of the art about shooting film,” says the New Mexico native. “You’re evolving as an artist by getting better and better with your camera and understanding what the film does.”

: Cody S. Brothers, Rhyolite Bank, photograph, 24 x 30.

: Cody S. Brothers, Mojave Gas Station, photograph, 16 x 48.

: Cody S. Brothers, Augberry Camp, Interior 1, photograph, 24 x 30.

A wide collection of Brothers’ black-and-white film studies, including an enlarged 2-by-4-foot version of LAMY, DISAPPEARING TRAIN, goes on view next month at Modernist Frontier in a solo exhibition entitled The Western Abandon. The show—which opens on Wednesday, June 17, with an artist’s reception that Friday at 5 p.m.—focuses on the photographer’s longtime fascination with deserted places in lonesome, often forgotten corners of the American West. Stark, incandescent, and affecting, Brothers’ images reflect his polished approach, from forecasting the perfect exposure to methodically processing his film. From start to finish, it’s a fast-disappearing tradition that the photographer aims to keep alive. “Part of what photography used to be is you’d go out, take the capture, process the film, and frame it yourself,” he says. “Every step of it was an art form.”

: Cody S. Brothers, Clarkdale, photograph, 30 x 24.

: Cody S. Brothers, Augberry Camp, Interior 3, photograph, 30 x 24.

: Cody S. Brothers, Augberry Camp Car, photograph, 24 x 30.

Brothers’ frequent use of infrared film lends a “ghostly glow,” as he describes it, to many of the evocative scenes on view, most of which he captured with a field camera or panoramic camera. Numerous images zoom in on crumbling storefronts, corroding automobiles, and eerily defunct gas stations, lodged like decaying relics in the dusty desert landscape. A separate photographic series examines the remnants of remote mining camps in Death Valley, where Brothers completed an artist’s residency in January. “There are strange things out in the desert that give it a Mad Max, post-apocalyptic feel,” he says. “I take pictures of these places because I don’t know if I will ever be there again, and if I do make it back, I don’t know if they’ll be there anymore.” —Kim Agricola

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