Philip Brookman – Redlands

Redlands weaves together an intimate sequence of photographs and a short story by Philip Brookman, set in California, Mexico, and New York City during the unsettled decades of the 1960s and 1970s. Brookman uses fiction and images from his own photographic diaries to create a first-person account of Kip, an artist who wanders back and forth between farmworkers and poets – between California and New York – seeking to question the meaning of his mother’s death. When Kip learns that he can’t trust the eyewitness accounts of his sister, he picks up a camera to find meaning in his own experience. By juxtaposing the oppositional strategies of fiction and documentary practice to find an invented narrative, Redlands questions the veracity of logical observation and embraces the poetry of the real world.