Detroit Highlight: Brittanie Bondie

Detroit Highlight: Brittanie Bondie by Sierra R. AguilarJune 18, 2025

Detroit is vivacious.

Alive with color, empathy, and tenacious nature. A place of constant evolution and endurance. As the automotive capital of the world, it can be easy to overlook the artistic legacy of Detroit artists and their contributions to contemporary and historical art. However, unique to the Michigan city, are artists of immense photographic caliber. Lens-based artists are exploring materiality, color, and the experimental variables of nature in relation to the city and its status. They are the key documentarians to evolution, growth, and historical changes to the community and the people who shape it. Photographing your way through the city, you are immersed into a multitude of cultures and perspectives, a vast range of landscapes and demographics, and a neighborhood of people who push past the stereotypes, into a new world of possibility.

As a love letter to my city, I’ve connected with three local photographers who are visually imperative to the discussion of materiality, color and experimental approaches in relation to photography.

In discussing experimentation, we are delving into the work of Brittanie Bondie.

Brittanie Bondie is an artist who works with analog photographic materials and experimental processes. She earned her MFA in Creative Photography from the University of Florida in 2015 and has since taught digital photography at various institutions, including the University of Wisconsin–Green Bay. Her first solo exhibition, Objective Material, featured large-scale, camera-less photographs inspired by the natural world.

Bondie’s work has been exhibited in museums and galleries across the U.S., including MOCA North Miami, Women Made Gallery in Chicago, and the Houston Center for Photography. In 2024, she was invited to participate in Detroit Lens, a landmark exhibition at the Detroit Artist Market celebrating Detroit photographers of the past, present, and future. Most recently, she was recognized as a top-voted photographer in the Composing Detroit exhibition at Playground Detroit, an honor reflecting her growing presence in the city’s visual arts scene.

She currently works in Detroit, where she also serves in the conservation department at the Detroit Institute of Arts, working closely with cultural objects on paper.

Follow Brittanie on Instagram!

My work confronts the fragility of our natural world and humanity’s destructive imprint through unconventional photographic processes. In this series, I used x-ray film as a substrate. I coated each sheet in cyanotype solution and immersed them directly into the Detroit River, a body of water laden with pollutants and scars of industrial abuse. This act allowed the river itself to imprint its contaminants onto the film, becoming both the subject and collaborator in the creation process.

After pulling the film from the river, I put it through another round of transformation, soaking each one first in wine, then in bleach. These weren’t just random materials; each one carried meaning. The wine stains the paper like memory or sediment, full of earthiness and ritual. The bleach, on the other hand, breaks things down, kind of like how industry wears away at the natural environment.

I’m drawn to the slow, corrosive, and hard to undo effects of the chemical. Together, they damage the surface, pushing the image into something more raw, unstable, and alive. These chemical reactions don’t just shift the look, they echo that tension between beauty and harm, control and collapse, the human and the elemental.

What’s left behind are cyanotypes that feel like fossils of human impact, ghostly, gorgeous, and uneasy all at once. They don’t sit comfortably in traditional categories like landscape or portrait. I think of them as uncharted visual photograms, where contamination becomes a collaborator. That tension, that push and pull, is exactly what I’m chasing with this work.

This project aligns with the ethos of 20th-century eco-artists but amplifies their urgency as we edge closer to ecological collapse. It is a reaction to the water crises in Michigan and the broader systemic disregard for Earth’s resources. At its core, this series of 28 images invites viewers to reimagine how we engage with nature and the photographic experience.

Through Bondie’s experimental approach to photographic processes, she draws attention to the necessity of the environment in relation to the artist and their community. Through this exploration, she exposes the natural, the impact of man, and touches upon the historical and futuristic importance of today. Be sure to keep up with Brittanie’s work: www.brittaniebondie.com

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