Matthew Brandt (b. 1982, Los Angeles) is an American photo-based artist known for an experimental, materially engaged practice. Working in Los Angeles, he draws on historic processes such as albumen printing, cyanotype, and wet-plate chemistry, while pushing them into unpredictable territory. He incorporates physical samples of his subjects—lake water, soil, minerals, honey, or insects—into developing, printing, or surface treatments. His photographs therefore function not only as images of places but also as chemical and physical witnesses to them.

Brandt’s best-known series, “Lakes and Reservoirs,” began with photographs of bodies of water across the American West. He submerged the color prints in water collected from the corresponding lakes, allowing minerals, pollutants, and other properties of the water to bleach, stain, and erode the photographic surface. The resulting images combine recognizable landscape with mottled fields, fading, and damage, making the process of deterioration part of the work’s subject. Rather than treating photography as a transparent window, Brandt turns it into an index of place and of the environmental conditions acting upon it.

This interest in material transformation continues in series including “Honeybees,” in which prints are coated with honey or made with beeswax, and “Minerals,” which uses mineral powders in the photographic process. Gummy bears, crushed insects, and other unconventional substances have also entered his chemistry. Across these projects, landscape, ecology, resource extraction, and the limits of photographic permanence are closely linked. The apparent messiness of the works is deliberate: physical change becomes both a visual language and a way of considering how places, organisms, and images age.

Brandt’s work has been exhibited widely in the United States and internationally, including at the J. Paul Getty Museum in the group exhibition “Light, Paper, Process: Reinventing Photography” and at the North Carolina Museum of Art. His gallery affiliations have included Yossi Milo, Haines Gallery, and M+B. His practice belongs to a continuing history of artists who treat photography as an experimental material, in dialogue with alternative-process practitioners such as Chris McCaw and Alison Rossiter. Brandt’s distinctive contribution is the direct integration of site-specific chemical and biological agents into the image, giving environmental concerns a physical presence within the print.

His photobooks extend this tactile practice into reproduction. “Lakes and Reservoirs,” published by Yossi Milo Gallery, and the monograph “Matthew Brandt,” issued by The Lapis Press, document important parts of his work, with the latter including several series and critical essays. Gallery catalogues offer more focused views of individual projects. For photobook and print collectors, these publications are valuable not simply as records but as material objects that echo the imperfect surfaces of the photographs. Editions and provenance should be verified through official gallery channels, but Brandt’s strongest work remains compelling for the way it reconsiders photographic history while addressing place, memory, and environmental change.

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