When We Finally Came to Rest by Cody Bratt

With just hours left to apply to Hey, Hot Shot!, we're tapping our fingers watching the last minute submissions roll in. One submission that came in late last night was the cinematic trio of images from Cody Bratt's series From Home and Back. Shooting stars criss-cross the desert night sky, taking me to an un-specifiable place out West where I half expect to see a cowboy to stumble across the image. In one image, lights are on in a home that sits alone in a great expanse, and a trailer door flaps open in the photo above, but human presence can only be detected through these hints, rather than seen standing in the open.

The blue, cold hue of the scenes captured here feel like movie stills from the Coen Brothers' No Country For Old Men. One can imagine the protagonist, Llewelyn Moss, who finds himself on the lam from a cold-hearted killer after finding a suitcase full of cash, in a setting such as these, hiding out for night in this trailer before taking off on the run again.

For Bratt, these images are about abandonment and discovery, and he writes,

There are likely thousands of stories in each place and, on the face of it, the voices inhabiting them have long since silenced themselves and moved on. But it is precisely this abandonment that makes these photographs about the opposite - discovery. Or put another way, accumulation. Each shot is a discovery and a love letter to the stories people held dear in these places.

The stories here are left to the imagination, and for Bratt, writing a history in found objects and places, is the beginning of a way to grow attached to what he has discovered.