Brandon Tani: Mining New Veins

Brandon Tani: Mining New Veins by Elliott LinwoodAugust 11, 2026

Brandon Tani, Untitled, 2025

Brandon Tani is a San Diego photographer who has received concerted attention through his participation in Medium Photography’s yearly festival and the organization’s juried events. Within the nexus of this borderlands photo community, Tani has presented portfolios of his recent and ongoing projects, which include photo books that outline the lyrical parameters of his investigations, as well as recordings of his music and sound works included in his practice. His most recent work, A Dead Tree in Our Yard, A Vibrant One on the Highway is a joint publication through Two Pants, California and Immaterial Books, Illinois.

His work examines notions of truth and trust as features of storytelling. In cinematic ways that reward those willing to pause and take in the breadth of nuance and evocative observations apparent in his work, he re-contextualizes a variety of genres in hybrid and compelling ways. I am also acquainted with the Tani through an artist’s group, where discussions of visual literacy, contemporary photographic practice and experimentation occur.

Could you please introduce yourself, tell us where you are from and where you work?

My name is Brandon Ichiro Tani. I was born and raised in San Diego, grew up in South Bay and have lived in El Cajon for over a decade. I spent lots of time in my youth with my mom’s family in Hawai’i, a place that feels similar to the heterogeneous tracts of San Diego. I have always found it difficult to work, especially in photography, in places where I have not lived in for sometime, so almost all my process involves my immediate place and surroundings and feels inseparable from that.

Could you describe your practice?

My work includes photography and video, sound, music and field recording. Creative practice as both ritual and discipline just clicks with me. There are conceptual roots as infrastructure, but habitual and raw unbiased time spent out in the world collecting material is a core part of my practice. Even though, ultimately, the vast majority of my work is solo, it feels intrinsically attached to these habits of being outside the studio among people. With both mediums there is a collection stage and then an editing and arrangement phase. Both are charged with the initial conceptual intent, with various weights that increase as projects reach finalization. Equally important to me are habits of reading, journaling, note-taking, etc., including the simple, casual everyday acts of circling around things that I find interesting or relevant, naming and noting them and such. Sometimes all of this feels fragmented and messy. I try to remember Corita Kent saying, “Find a place you trust and then try trusting it for a while.”

I played music in my youth and 20s, mostly with collaborative band environments and improvisation. This eventually translated into working with sound in more electro-acoustic and musique concrète sorts of practices. I got into photography and started taking it seriously as a solo interdisciplinary practice more recently.

Having dropped out of college and danced around a couple of majors while I was there, including music composition, English, and poetry—but never with any depth. I consider myself mostly auto-didactic, learning mostly from reading.

I have observed my work moving from more intimate interpersonal diarist approaches to exploring socio-political dimensions regarding land, time, and people. I’m increasingly interested in the mixing of genres, including abstract and real, fiction and nonfiction, and exploring notions of cohesion and transference through sequencing, montage, narrative, etc. One of my goals is to expand this work into physical installations that combine sound art with visual imagery, layering, and uses of space.

What types of methods and subject matter does your work explore?

I am interested in using both sequencing and collage to organize relationships between myself, the individuals I collaborate with, and various visual and object-based ways we inhabit and identify particular places. Just as the people in my portraits simultaneously hold both themselves and me in their gaze, I try to organize my images as a way to explore both outward and inward types of interdependence. I work mostly in digital, some tapes and vinyl, with the occasional zine; working towards photo books, and projects that can be molded to various mediums and sites.

What audiences do you have in mind when producing work?

During the capture, collection and generation phase, I try to be as unbiased and raw as I possibly can. However, as someone who works with strangers, and is attracted to everyday living, I also recognize some of the contradictions around fine art photography and conceptual art practices, in terms of types of distance between these kinds of practices and subjects and collaborators—that the vocabulary and sometimes academic tint can be at odds with those my work is trying to depict. To put it plainly, the economic and sociopolitical boundaries of art are often inaccessible to some of the people that I find myself working with. Although I do not believe I am solving this disparity within my art, maybe, on a good day, I might call attention to it, at least in the process of bearing witness.

How long do your projects usually take?

Increasingly longer. Before, typically a year or less, balancing and completing multiple projects per year. Now, I feel like I’m in the middle of a thing that will take at least a couple more years. I also relate to artists like David Lynch, who explore related themes through separate projects their entire life. I don’t see this as rehashing, just re-framing, readjusting, probing and seeking multifaceted answers.

What level of visual literacy would you say is useful in understanding your work?

I think about this a lot in terms of how approachable the work is, the role of challenging art, accessibility, democratic photos, audience, etc. I don’t think I’m a person that says “none” to that question. I can look back at my work and see a movement away from things that are self-contained, and a gradual shift towards demanding a more contextual view. I’m not sure if I have a keen enough eye currently or enough separation from my own work to know if it is true, but it feels to be the case. I also strongly believe that my work is of this time—and that maybe it’s true that one has to be tapped into “this time” to fully evaluate it. Especially with photography, there is a relationship with the real that is always present, although not always in a direct relationship, since a photograph it is not the real itself. However, photography, for me, must be considered as intrinsically linked to the world and politics.

Within what contexts do you wish for your work to be circulated?

This is tied to the audience question for me, and the increasing alienation of artist from audience. So, I’m not sure. Physical exhibition spaces are a goal of mine, but that desire comes from a point of view about the medium of photography and installation art, rather than an audience issue. To me, sequence and montage are super important. I am not very interested in the circulation of a single image. I also want to build and show a project in its full completion. However, I am not blind to the fact that sometimes single images are required in specific circumstances.

When you introduced your work to me, I recall you framing your practice within a post documentary genre. Can you describe this?

It’s slightly difficult, since I am discussing this from a non-analytical point of view, but instead strictly from a consumer perspective—where I’m consuming the work of various artists that are lumped into a lyrical and post documentarian genre, some consciously, others maybe not. I think it runs a gambit of folks who are approaching the practice in a more conceptual way; where truth and fiction, and reality and non-reality… these lines are really being challenged and sought after. By virtue of that, this group of people are exploring this kind of very interesting contemporary field.

Very much so in Kristine Potter’s Dark Waters, a book recently published by Aperture. In this body of work, she mixes studio portraiture with the staged and candid photographs, which include fight scenes, references to landscapes, and inter-textual materials. I see this approach as a very clear and conscious exploration of the edges between truth and fiction; in a very direct-to-audience way, an accusation of sorts, doubly so considering her subject.

That makes sense to me.

This terrain is complicated, in that you’ll find other folks in the genre that are doing maybe less conceptual and more personal perspective-like work. Producing this sort of lyrical, poetic, non-narrative sort of thing—where they’re loosening the grip on the binary, of say, this is the document of what I saw, and therefore, what I am showing you is truth.

These folks are shifting these definitions, and proposing: I’m going to present you with a more personal, poetic, fragmented, smeared, unfocused, collective view of this thing. And through this process, I am also providing you access to something else that you normally maybe wouldn’t have access to if this was a straight up documentary approach. I’m not placing value judgments on either side. It’s just that I enjoy both, and find them equally interesting. Not to say the latter camp is without deeper themes, but maybe just hold them with a slightly looser grip.

Along these lines, I align myself with Werner Herzog’s ideas about an ecstatic truth.

Can you expand on these ideas?

I believe the term is originally from his manifesto, which is very Herzogian, if you get a chance to read it. However, I will flatten it to two points. First of all, the existence of the camera in a place, and the capturing of something with a camera, automatically removes that thing from truth – even if only through the act of framing something. Herzog directed this comment at a specific type of documentary style, but I think it applies to any kind of camera work. When you frame something as a photographer, when you decide to capture, even with a disembodied camera that just automatically records, will only be capturing certain things at a certain time in a certain way. This includes editing decisions, sequencing decisions, inter-textual decisions – all of which increasingly manipulate the truth of the thing that was happening.

Secondly, Herzog says that if all of these things are going on, then a possibly more poetic truth may be built out of these falsehoods, by interjecting yourself into the piece, stylizing it, and incorporating other approaches. You can look at his works to extrapolate these ideas and practices, regarding what you can add to the work to make it more quote/unquote “true.”

At the same time, I hold the opinion that there is some sort of truth to be irked out of images, probably through collection, sequence or collage of imagery, via fragments and archives, etc. I guess, that’s my take. In my case, I prefer to de-emphasize an individual photograph in terms of both form and narrative. I am much more interested in the process of collaging and its effects, with regard to fragmentation and reconstruction. The impact of grouping photos seems to better fit the process of reading images, and feels closer to a real lived experience to me.

My work moves these things around the field, prodding them from different perspectives, through focusing, unfocusing and turning them over, which reflects the types of subject matter I like to deal with. I believe this is a uniquely contemporary sort of approach—where inherent and learned skepticism overlap with the tech, algorithmic and surveillance modes of viewing—in ways that these things bleed into our mixed, removed and constantly shifting perspectives of time and place.

I am not merely talking about false images, but more the whole of our alienation from stability and the positions where we could see and determine the connection between what is captured and truth. The relationship of smoke to the fire is, increasingly, disconnected. Influences who practicing this mode include Jia Zhangke’s Caught by the Tides, Abbas Kiarostami’s Close-Up, as well as the work of Carolyn Drake and Kristine Potter immediately come to mind.

Do you start with your eye, gut, ideas, and do you take lots of images with various kinds of presentations in mind?

I generally start with a concept and some vague subject parameters, but I try to be as unbiased and fluid when making photos out in the world—carrying these themes with various weights and levels of attentiveness. I try to remain in continual conversation with the process.

With photographs involving people, I tend to be pretty intentional—less around what the photograph might actually end up being, but rather what I go in with as an intention to make something worthwhile in both our eyes, in terms of the time and energy that people are gifting to me. What typically ends up happening is an amalgamation of subject and author, which are collaborations I gladly pursue every time.

In your newer images the form and content appears so ambiguous, it’s almost as if you are attempting to pry free and maybe relay the absence of an author within the context of the gaze.

That feels legit. And to take it a step further, if inter-subjective relationships are inherently a given, then what happens next? These new “vacuum” portraits, that you are referring to, ask the viewer to actually abhor that vacuum, I guess… then see what happens through that iteration.

Most of the highly nuanced images of yours to which I am drawn, nevertheless, seem to hold a charge of authenticity.

It’s interesting that you mention “authentic,” because it is such a hard word for me. Likewise, with “sincerity.” I have difficulty with both of these terms. I’m not saying that I think you’re wrong, and I agree that they are coming from a place of authenticity. It’s just that I think communicating only via authenticity or sincerity just doesn’t work for me.

I’m not saying that the images themselves are authentic, real or true, but rather that they perhaps rely on these kinds of charges to achieve narrative aims. For instance, the liminal aspects of what you capture don’t seem to readily conform to Western tropes of storytelling that premises, if there is no conflict, then there is no storyline. Instead a sensibility of parallel realms and fragmented activities ripples throughout your work.

A good friend of mine has described them along the lines of a hidden witness. Nan Goldin has talked about a basic gut default, which is our need to witness, even when explanations and concepts fail. These perspectives and practices speak to me.

I am not sure that I’ve reached it yet, but a goal with my work in general, and with sound pieces too, is to introduce a sort of pause… A thing that interjects and pauses the viewers’ learned or adopted reactions—just long enough to realize that there are alternative viewing paths. So, the power of what I’m trying to accomplish, relies on providing an initial pause, prompted from within the work. So, I think a sense of vacuum or absence is a good vehicle to potentially do that, though of course not the only way.

Since you are also a musical artist, I wonder if your interest in sequencing might be informed by your musical interests?

Image sequencing does scratch the musical structure itch, absolutely. Both in the way events and objects can be arranged not just linearly, but the way things interact over micro and macro gestures guided through various pathways. Additionally, my interest in sequencing is an allure of the collective—a tendency to want to bring in more, to second-guess and switch and bend and remake. I am trying to explore something that feels nearer to contemporary experience, which to me always involves fragmentation, delay, varying degrees of accuracy and purpose, transmission, unsettled ground.

The immediate and noticeable lack of uniformity and connection, oddly, is precisely the connection I am looking for. It’s what ties the work together.