A multigenerational family story centered on the limited relationship between a bereaved son and his long-deceased mother (who died in a plane crash), as well as that same son’s new life as a husband and father. This nonlinear, narrative-driven book charts an artist’s journey through alternating currents of grief, pleasure, love, and heartache, suggesting how the past is ever-present.

As an elegy contextualized within a decades deep family archive, Son Pictures combines Trent Davis Bailey’s own photography and writing from the past decade with premonitory drawings and paintings made by his mother in the 1960s and ‘70s; family snapshots from the 1980s, ‘90s, and 2020s; gritty photojournalism from 1989 repurposed from a newspaper’s archive in Iowa; and film stills sourced from two Hollywood movies set in Iowa that—along with camcorder footage from a home video—the artist rephotographed on a 1990s tube television.

Initially seeking to memorialize and somehow reconcile with the tragic death of his mother in the crash landing of United Airlines Flight 232 in Sioux City, Iowa in 1989, Bailey’s intent for this work shifted greatly when thirty years later, in 2019, he himself became a father. The result is an emotionally wrought and yet still fraught compilation that oversteps the standardized and staid conventions of family photo albums and slideshows. For the artist, this book is “a photographic memorial and an atlas of memory,” one that has allowed him to grapple with the residue of having been thrust into the global media spotlight at a very young age and designated—along with his brothers (who survived the crash) and his father—as a subject in survivor stories. By culling a variety of imagery created before, during, and after the crash, Son Pictures looks into the motherless chasm of an American household and conveys its outgrowths and shards of grief and trauma with a necessary heavy heartedness, but also with humor and hope.

For Bailey, it’s important this intensely personal body of work blurs lines of authorship. The result is one that processes the artist’s painful early years and his more recent evolution as a father, while at the same time questioning the associative relationship between truth and photography, the interchange between images and memory, and the ethics of representation in both Hollywood and photojournalism. Put simply, this book is a discursive time warp and a reminder that behind every tragic news event there are people whose lives are forever impacted.