Photographs by Cody Bratt
Publisher: Fraction Editions
Hardcover, 10 in. x 13 in.
96 pages
56 color plates
Trade Edition of 500
View Collector's Box Edition of 25

“If the walls in the room could talk
I wonder to myself, would they laugh?
It's like some kind of jail
Beams of light
Fall through the curtains onto the bed
I'm all alone now, I can do as I please
I don't feel like doing much of anything
True love ain't that hard to find
Not that you will ever know
Would you lay here for awhile?
Please do not let me go”

- Lyrics by Ryan Adams, Please Do Not Let Me Go

Love We Leave Behind is born from revisited memories of a formative relationship I shared with a partner many years ago. We loved each other fervently, yet we were unable to manage the respective fears and challenges we each brought to the other. As the relationship progressed, we were unaware that we were endlessly pirouetting between joy and self-destruction with each passing day. Even as we began to realize, neither of us were quite able to let go of each despite passing the relationship’s expiration date.

In making these photographs and the monograph, I wanted to create an “emotional documentary” of which depicts the journey one might take in trying to find the strength to break away from such a sickly love. Each photograph doesn’t mark a literal or specific memory. I mean the photographs to be read as an ambiguous state of mind, as memories and dreams simultaneously half invented and half lived. Indeed, many of these moments are drawn from recurring images I only vaguely remember now.

My goal was to create a series of photographs which felt specific enough to be familiar, yet open enough for the viewer to inhabit and fill in with their own story. I borrowed recognizable visual tableaux from the American road trip and mixed them with intimate portraits in temporary spaces meant to depict the interior moments of the journey. Combined, I hope they render the lyrical, although never reliably factual, sense of searching, discovery and loss inherent in letting go.

The series was named one of Photolucida's 2018 Critical Mass Top 50 and was a finalist in the 2016 CDS/Honickman First Book Prize.

View or purchase the limited edition of Love We Leave Behind with a print.