Originally published in The Voice of San Francisco in December 2025
The Haines Gallery presents Matthew Brandt: From the Ashes, the gallery’s first solo exhibition with the Los Angeles-based experimental photographer, on view at Haines’ Building C through January 10, 2026.
Merging Subject with Substance
Known for his inventive, materially driven processes, Matthew Brandt merges subject with substance via fusing materials gathered from the places they represent with the resulting photograph. His images are frequently developed with water and dirt connected with his subject locations. “Most of what I do,” Brandt explains, “stems from the relationship between the photographic subject and its representational material. Each methodology has its own baggage to carry, and that baggage becomes part of the work’s meaning.” Moving beyond photography as a documentarian utility, the resulting pictures contain tangible traces of what they portray.
This process is labor intensive, drawing on the alchemical beginnings of photography. Conceptual rigor and material experimentation comes together to create art that often addresses social and environmental concerns. In January Skies (2025), Brandt pays homage to his hometown with a series capturing the roiling smoke and ochre-tinged skies during the wildfires that devastated parts of Los Angeles in January 2025. The pigments, inkjet prints transferred onto wet plaster and then applied to cement panels, cracked and fissured while drying. The completed photographs are fresco-like, presenting the imagery like an archaeological record found after a catastrophe.
The Carbon Series
Using a process akin to carbon printing, Brandt used industrial synthetics manufactured by DuPont – the same corporation long associated with “forever chemicals” used in everything from vehicles to building materials – to print photographs of trees. Florida Strangler (2022-23) features the native Ficus aurea, a strangler fig tree that begins life high in another tree’s canopy and grows downward, ultimately enveloping and “strangling” the host with its roots. Pairing the image of the sinister twisted fig tree branches with petrochemicals underscores the relationship between nature and industry, parasitism and survival.
Eagles
The Eagles series (2017-19) comprises a grid of 50 daguerreotypes of bald eagles fighting over salmon. The images, captured during Alaska’s annual Bald Eagle Festival, began as a foray into wildlife photography but evolved into a pointed reflection on American symbolism. “All I was witnessing,” Brandt recalls, “was eagles stealing from each other – a constant battle for salmon.” In a metaphor for competition, consumption and power, Brandt designed each image on a silver plate cast from melted-down American Silver Eagle coins. The composition of these diving, swooping birds –talons reaching in domination to grab their meal- remains a relevant representation of this country’s ongoing sociopolitical tensions.
Dust
Some newly created works will be on display from Brandt’s ongoing Dust series. These pictures reanimate archival images of now-demolished buildings that once stood near Haines’ Fort Mason location – the temporary palaces of the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition, and the former immigration and detention buildings on Angel Island – all printed with dust collected from their present day sites. Panama Pacific International Fair (2025), a gum-bichromate print on paper with dust swept from a residential stairwell, shows the remains of the grand but temporary 1915 structure. Angel Island (2025) shows the aforementioned buildings on fire. This print is also made with dust swept from the island itself, specifically Ayala Cove’s north ridge trail stairway. The Dust images make us question progress, decay and what in our society is ultimately subject to erasure and exclusion.
Wai’anae
Nature’s intervention and its unpredictable results drive the narrative behind Brandt’s series Wai‘anae (2015). Named after the Oahu town in which the works were created, the chromogenic prints of Oahu’s dense forests were rolled in dirt, leaves, burlap, and lace, and buried in the local terrain. Part image and part archaeology, the soil’s elements altered the works through erosion. Erosion and the elements act as change agents, superimposing new patterns on the final result. Wai‘anae echoes Hawaiian funerary customs in which the enshrouded body is returned to the ground.
Matthew Brandt’s From the Ashes explores the boundaries between image and matter, culture and environment, creation and entropy. The detritus of our former monuments, the haze of wildfire skies and the corrosion of prints comprised of dust and dirt – and the gleam of recast silver – tells the viewer a story. The pictures are signposts telling us where we have been, and where we are going, in a collision of time, place and chemistry.