As spaces age and pass through their own life cycle, do our experiences and passions leave a mark?

Love We Leave Behind consists of two intertwined threads: landscapes and portraits. The combination represents and merges two distinct image making processes. The landscapes were made by traveling—day and night—through thousands of miles of seemingly unbound spaces in California and Nevada. In contrast, the portraits were shot in short (one to two hour) sessions in small and confined spaces; the only variables being the room, the model and myself.

I wanted to ask two questions: as we build places into the land and pass through them, what sorts of marks do our interior emotional lives leave behind and, as those places age and disappear, does that emotional residue continue to persist in a
detectable fashion?

In the end, by fusing both documentary and fictional narrative approaches, I aimed to open enough ambiguity in the realness of the story for the answer to those questions to be dependent on the viewer’s own relationship with the images. In other words, it’s likely that our longevity is entirely dependent on the stories we choose to tell ourselves about the places we’ve been. — Cody Bratt

– Love We Leave Behind is published by Fraction Editions and now available for pre-order here. Discover more of Cody’s work directly at www.codybratt.com