Anna Brody is a photographer and empath currently studying at the Savannah College of Art and Design in Georgia. She began making images through film and darkroom process in 2005 and now brings her compassionate perspective and bottomless reservoir of chameleonic emotions to her work in medium and large format color film.
Her work focuses primarily on longing, loneliness, contentment, cyclical mood shifts, and escapism, all as represented by or found within the social and built landscape.
She also likes to take pictures of other people whose feelings she can see out loud. Since 2-14 Anna has been an editorial assistant with Aint-Bad, an independent publisher of new photographic art.
Her work has been shown in exhibitions throughout the U.S., and her ongoing series Edging, GA was most recently awarded as a winner of the 2017 PDN Photo Annual. She instagrams a lot, has strong and hasty reactions to things a lot, gets enthusiastic and/or sentimental about things a lot, and goes jogging approximately once every two months or so.
About ‘Edging GA’:
Edging, GA doesn’t really exist – it’s a place that I’m creating from an amalgam of images of my surroundings. Time passes slowly here, at a speed that allows for close examinations of bugs and bones and openings, and in light that is never harsh; Edging exists only at sunrise and sunset. Challenges are presented here, obstacles are overcome, hearts ache, things and people get old and die. It is of this world, but with the edges filed down to a smooth bevel, corners rounded.
Though Edging, GA is not a real place, it is very close – you and I are almost there, but never will be. You cannot touch your shadow, you cannot make a sunset stay, because nowhere would ever be as good if we actually got there. By the time we actually got there it would be dirty, and we would be tired. Edging is more of a mirage than a fantasy: something you can really see, something that looks corporeal from far away – no matter whether you are looking backwards or forwards – but as soon as you get close it disappears.
Longing, loneliness and the desire to fill our holes and gaps and close our distances is one of the most compelling forces in life, and the feeling of edging towards the fulfillment of your desire is often better than the fulfillment itself – that is assuming fulfillment itself is even possible. I don’t know yet if these are actually the right words for these feelings, or just some words I learned that fit the best.
I don’t know if the people in my pictures are the ones who have made themselves comfortable and warm in these feelings or if they are the ones who are just as scared of them as I am.
Maybe the people in my pictures are the ones who also don’t know what to call it, and also use “lonely” or some other inadequate descriptor to give it a name. Maybe, though, there is no word, and I’m getting closer to being a person who isn’t searching for it. Maybe that’s what I’m taking pictures of – people and things that are also almost there, who have almost kicked over the rock under which it has been hiding, or are almost done looking.
