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Work Samples

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Mike

24" x 30", Kodak Portra 160, 2022.

4th of July

20" x 16", Mounted on Dibond, Kodak Porta 160, 2016.

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About Brad

Baltimore City

Brad Ziegler's picture
Brad Ziegler is a photographer and visual arts educator based out of Baltimore, Maryland. His work explores the underlying beauty, sadness, and occasional humor that can be found beneath the veneer of American myths. Brad’s work has been featured locally at galleries including Current Space, Full Circle, and the Hot Sauce Bromo District PopUp. He has also been featured in group exhibitions and publications both nationally and internationally including the Subjectively Objective Gallery, UMBRELLA Art... more

The False Parting

When our pursuit of wealth has finally spoiled the earth, what if we could start over, taking the fabric of all that we've known and loved and plant a new seed on a different planet? Would it even be wise to do so, knowing that we are just as likely to do it again? Perhaps it's best to just leave blueprints for the cosmos to figure it out for themselves. 

The False Parting is an in-progress body of work started in 2022 containing photographs made along the trails of the California Gold Rush. Through weaving images of natural and synthetic landscapes, I am seeking to further understand the ways we preserve, memorialize, and exploit our resources. The photo series explores a "pseudo-nature", turning images into a scavenger hunt of what is loved and lost, hoping that we might once again find our way. 

Other Side

Other Side is an ongoing investigation of neglected space, land use, and community set in the lush visual landscape of a DIY skatepark in Baltimore. Through images involving both builders and users of the space and its surrounding environment, this series imagines a counter-narrative to the increasingly limited ways contemporary society permits play and imagination within its current structure.

This project functions as a lyrical photo series which incorporates elements of fantasy and the poetic in informing its visual language. In August of 2021, a work-in-progress showing was hosted at The Meadow in Baltimore, curated by Hot Sauce Artists Collective. Portraiture and landscape images were presented in a salon-style hanging, interspersed with found text and graphics from antique Farmers Almanacs. The photos ranged from documentation of users and builders of the space, bucolic landscapes littered with the remnants of its city existence, and evidence of the seasons passing through “farming” cycles. The incorporation of found text poetically linked the tradition of farming as a means of providing sustenance to a community with the work and ethos of this modern-day concrete farm. 

Squeegee

Squeegee is a photography and film collaboration between Brad Ziegler and filmmaker Khalid Ali. 

In January of 2017, we came together to begin exploring the car window washing work that the young men on the downtown Baltimore corner of Washington Boulevard and MLK were doing, and from there let the scope of the project expand organically. As two high school teachers, we are moved by the ways in which young people respond to adverse circumstances, choosing often to rise up by their own means rather than work within a given system. This project exists as our contribution to the increasingly public debate about squeegee workers.

All proceeds from the project went to Baltimore Youth Arts, an arts and entrepreneurship program that works with youth ages 14-22, with a focus on those in the juvenile justice system. 

The project culminated in a photography book and film release that was scheduled to be held in April 2020 at Full Circle Gallery in Baltimore, Maryland. The event was cancelled due to COVID-19. The book's first edition of 100 has sold out, and the film has continued to be screened virtually at various festivals across the country.

  • Taevon's Room

    Taevon was one of the first young men we met during the creation of this project. Though he decided shortly after that he didn't have an interest in working on the corner, he remained closely involved in informing the thinking and development of our collaboration.
  • Rome

    24" x 30", Kodak Ektar 100, 2019.
  • The Corner, Washington Blvd

    30" x 24", Kodak Portra 160, 2019.
  • Michael

    30" x 30", Kodak Portra 160, 2018.
  • Song 1: Vision

    Written by Taevon. 24" x 30". 2017.
  • TaeTae

    30" x 24", Kodak Portra 160, 2018
  • Traffic Sighting

    30" x 30", Kodak Portra 160, 2018.
  • Summer 2018

    30" x 24", Kodak Portra 400, 2018.
  • Traffic Control

    24" x 30", Kodak Ektar 100, 2019.
  • Squeegee

    8.75" x 10.75, 59 Pages, Perfect-Bound, Foil Stamped Cover, 2020.

Participation Trophy

Participation Trophy is a project designed to combine elements of humor and nostalgia in a way that is both specific to the artist and universally attributed to the millennial generation. Each trophy was shot on the location in which despite having a losing season, an award was still given. The choice of installation location as a restaurant mimics American culture’s fascination with sports memorabilia as decor. 

The accompanying book, a 5 foot long double-sided accordion fold, plays with the symbolic weight of an undeserved trophy by making the sum of its earnings too much to comfortably view when held fully extended. 

Solo Exhibition, Rocket to Venus 2019

Horizon Compromise

This is a love letter to the inherent loneliness found within the collective spirit of America.

In the liminal spaces of cities, tensions between the landscape and its occupants arise. Physically connected but spiritually isolated, road arteries sprawl and bleed the debris of convenience and consumerism. This time the west was won by advertising agencies. Some are tangibly present in the way their pleas for purchase interrupt the horizon and dwarf the pedestrian scale. Other haunting pockmarks are left to languish, existing as warning symbols of neglected capital. Situated within this minefield of active and dormant sites lies a strained reprise of what once worked, and now will not. The technical future is moving forward too rapidly for the manual past. The landscape of America is a purposeless wash, whisking us helplessly downstream through its muddy embankments, all while the golden warmth of the sun sets on the horizon.

Solo exhibition, Current Space, 2018.