Documenting
America With
Garrett Bradley

On our phone call, Bradley is warm and enthusiastic about her work. Her films focus on the hyperpersonal, because hers is a personal work––one guided by a language of liberation. Along with America, Bradley recently released Time, a searing documentary about the toll incarceration takes on a family in Louisiana. Since its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, the documentary has been hailed as a modern classic of documentary filmmaking—Bradley became the first Black woman to win the festival’s prestigious U.S. Documentary Directing Award, and in January won Best Documentary at the Gotham Independent Film Awards. Next, the filmmaker will undertake a documentary series for Netflix about tennis prodigy Naomi Osaka.

Bradley’s America is not a reimaging or retelling of history––it is an understanding that America’s evolution is dependent on its self-reflection. On display this winter at the Museum of Modern Art as a part of the institution’s multi-year partnership with the Studio Museum in Harlem, the short will also be released later this year by Field of Vision. The film depicts Black life in America in the early 1900s in a dreamy, mythical manner that Bradley has previously described as iconographic.

Legacy Russell, the associate curator of exhibitions at the Studio Museum in Harlem, who curated Bradley’s exhibition alongside Studio Museum director Thelma Golden, says that Bradley’s installation and conceptions of the grand mythos of America speaks to our current moment, where the grotesque anti-Black racism at the nation’s core is being reexamined in the mainstream: “The premise of America is one that we thought deeply about as timed, of course, in this moment in history. We are sharing in this collective consciousness and lived experience, and also, too, that there are fractal moments––that people are living in many different types of Americas.”

Bradley was born in New York to two artist parents, who split soon after their marriage. In fact, her first film––created when she was just sixteen––was an autopsy of her parents’ split, which she described to Ismail Muhammad of the New York Times as a “cross-examination” of her mother and father, where she was able to “ask all these questions [she] just didn’t feel safe asking without a camera.”

After high school, she moved to Los Angeles to attend film school at UCLA, a poetic fact considering that Bradley’s films are now in conversation with the luminary Black filmmakers of the L.A. Rebellion that emerged at the school in the 70s and 80s. When it came time to craft her thesis film, she moved to New Orleans to shoot what would become Below Dreams, her first feature. The film, a portrait of three twenty-somethings caught in the wake of New Orleans’ economic crisis, was based off of interviews and conversations she would conduct with her fellow passengers on her bus trips to visit the city while she still lived in California. Journalist Collier Meyerson, one of Bradley’s close friends, remembers seeing the film’s premiere at 2014’s Tribeca Film Festival, and thinking that Bradley had an incredible ability to cut through ego: “She's the same way in person. There's never any pretension with her, only a serious and earnest desire to know you.”

In 2015, following the filming of Below Dreams, Desmond Watson (one of the actors cast by Bradley via Craigslist advertisement) was arrested. Bradley decided to capture the struggle of Watson’s partner Aloné Watts as she advocates for Watson’s release. In the resulting short, Alone, Watts seeks a support system for her and Watson after her family’s shocking dismissal of their engagement, leading her to discover the female activists fighting for their incarcerated loved ones in Louisiana’s notoriously corrupt and neglectful prison system.

One of the women Watts and Bradley met along the way was Sibil Fox Richardson, known to her community as Fox Rich. At the beginning of filming, Bradley “reached out to an organization called Friends and Families of Louisiana's Incarcerated Children, and Gina Womack, one of the co-founders and director of the organization, picked up and said, 'The first person that you have to speak with is Fox Rich.'"

Richardson and Bradley’s chance meeting became the catalyst for Bradley’s lush and elegiac Time, which––like Alone––captures Richardson in her struggle to free her husband Rob from the Louisiana State Penitentiary. Twenty years ago, Rob and a friend commited a botched armed robbery. Both were sentenced to sixty years in prison alongside Sibil, who was imprisoned for three-and-a-half years as an accomplice. After Sibil’s time in jail, she returned home to the couple’s young children and began the long journey of advocating for her husband’s release. Within two decades, she transformed herself into a community leader helping other families experiencing incarceration, all while running her own business and raising her sons. Throughout the course of the film, we see her speaking at meetings and helping other families caught in the incessant violence of the criminal justice system, advocating against the casual cruelties of bureaucracy and indifference.

To try to redeem the unredeemable, Sibil begins to document her and her sons lives with a camcorder. She captures waking them up on the first day of school and other moments from small to monumental—kept secret from Bradley until much later in the production. In an earlier interview with Amy Taubin in Film Comment, Bradley says that “[on] the last day of shooting, I told Fox, ‘Okay, I’m going into the edit, and I’ll see you in three months.’ And she was like, ‘Oh hold on a second, I have this bag,’ and in the bag was 18 years of mini-DV tapes. It was like my worst nightmare and my biggest dream come true. I believe it was almost 100 hours of footage. And I watched all of it.”

Legacy Russell notes the importance of the tapes, saying that this is where Sibil “becomes a director in her own right.” She describes Bradley’s films as “beautiful documents of ways of refusing a sort of hierarchy of working,” allowing for open collaboration between herself and others in the community. We see this in her interpolation of Sibil’s tapes and the conversations that shaped her early work in New Orleans; Sibil is the one who is able to “make this incredibly vivid connection between slavery and the prison industrial complex,” according to Bradley. “It became really important for me, as a filmmaker, to think about ways in which the conversation around incarceration could be extended from specifically a Black feminist, Southern point of view––from a familial point of view, from a point of view that focused on the effects of the facts.”

When I ask Bradley about her own conceptions of herself as an artist and as a filmmaker, she rejects any self-imposed binaries: “It's less about validating myself as an artist or being considered an artist or being considered a filmmaker,” she says. “I'm not interested in labels, not interested in genre. I think that's for other people to decide. I think that the work––the work needs to inform the shape it wants to take on. And sometimes the same idea takes on different shapes.” If there is one element that makes Garrett Bradley’s filmmaking so essential, it is this: that the story and the people in the stories are paramount. Guided by her immense filmmaking talent and genuine desire to capture the small human moments that anchor activism in real-life struggle, her storytelling is a community project in which we are all witnesses.

Madeleine Seidel is a curator and writer based in Brooklyn. She has previously worked at the Whitney Museum of American Art and Atlanta Contemporary. Her writing on film, performance, and the art of the American South has been published in Art Papers, frieze, The Brooklyn Rail, and others.