David Brandy

I love creating photographs. That may sound like a cliché, but it’s true. I’ve been a “creative” my entire life; however, photography was an unanswered calling for me for decades. Then, in 2013, I finally bought my first digital SLR camera. Tens of thousands of frames later, here I am.

Today, I create lens-based art, which thrills me to no end. I have an eye for capturing images, and my artist CV includes awards and accolades to back that up. (I also appreciate the card my mom wrote.)

My passion as an artist is to capture human-altered landscapes with a sense of the uncanny—a feeling of something being strangely familiar. My images evoke a sense of beauty and strangeness, reflecting a splendour we seldom notice.

In my ongoing series, “Newer Topographics,” I have created a canvas that emphasizes the strong sense of isolation humankind feels when natural landscapes are juxtaposed with solitary manmade constructs.

As an artist, my joy lies in the fact that it may take a moment or two for my images to unveil themselves to you. When they do, I hope you see the same beauty and feel the same sense of wonder that I experience.

My latest series of work is called "The New Standing Stones". This project tells a story of ancestry, immigration, and resilience in a new world, through portraits of some of the earliest farm silos built in Ontario, Canada, between the late 1800’s and mid-1900’s. I began this project to honour the life of my great, great grandfather James Brandy who came to this new land – a life of perilous hard work, near starvation, and for James, a tragic end in 1872 when a barn fire took his life.

Today, many of the original structures (farmhouses, barns, sheds, and outbuildings), have long decayed and disappeared. The solid silo, however, remains the only vestige of many of those early farms. Still standing tall as a lone sentinel that pays tribute to the advent of modern agriculture and settlement in Ontario.