Garrett Bradley on creating visual metaphor through film and static image

The story behind her new edition – available now

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May 31, 2026 9:30am EDT

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Garret Bradley's work lives between our interior emotions and material realities.

The artist and Oscar-nominated filmmaker invites us into her unique cinematic language in an exclusive interview about her new edition, In the palm of my hands, 2026.

Garrett Bradley: In the palm of my hands, 2026 Portrait

Over the past decade, Garrett Bradley has emerged as one of the most singular voices in contemporary cinema, crafting work that bridges the distance between archival documentation and lived experience. In a way, her work addresses the very texture of memory itself.

Born in New York, and a resident of New Orleans, Louisiana, Bradley first gained attention through a series of short films that combined lyrical imagery with sharp political observation. She frames her subjects with a richness once reserved for movie stars, with moments of humdrum domesticity bathed in a saintly, luminous glow.

We spoke to Bradley about the release of this edition and her wider practice.

Garrett Bradley: In the palm of my hands, 2026 Detail

Garrett Bradley: In the palm of my hands, 2026 Signing

Tell us about the original work this edition comes from and why you chose it?

The edition comes from a trilogy of films exploring the nuanced overlap between women’s interior and exterior lives. The first film, AKA, focused on the nuanced relationships between mothers and daughters – particularly in relation to race and upward mobility outside the family structure. I was interested in what is lost and gained as women move through the world carrying intimate familial bonds while also being shaped by love, labor, and social expectation. How do these relationships shape the way we see ourselves, and the way others come to see us?

The second film in the trilogy, SAFE – from which this edition is drawn – turns more directly toward interior life. I wanted to explore the difficulty of representing emotion, intuition, instinct, and psychic overwhelm through cinema, especially since the interior can never be fully visible or resolved into image. I was thinking about Kevin Quashie and his suggestion that interiority itself is a radical space within Black life precisely because it resists spectacle and easy description.

Across the trilogy, I approach visual metaphor as a way of approximating interior emotion and recovering less visible histories. The image chosen for this edition felt especially connected to the present moment, to the ways sound and our sensorial landscape shape our inner lives, and how those inner lives in turn, shape our material reality.

With this edition is there a relationship you want to pursue between film and static image, or do you view them as very separate entities?

I see them as extensions of one another. Films are made up of still images, and I’ve always thought that if I could pause a film I’ve made, and that moment could adequately articulate an entire idea, I would have accomplished what I wanted.

A static image is also time based and can shift and grow for as long as you’re willing to stay with it. That isn’t exactly the case with moving images which have more control over the pace of your experience.

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