Bryan Garris has learned not to trust the first visit. A landscape may be impressive immediately, but the photographs he values most often arrive later—after another season, another kind of light, another walk past a composition he had ignored dozens of times before.

Photography first mattered to him as a child, when basic point-and-shoot cameras became a way to interact with the world and keep memories of people and places. He stopped around high school, returned to photography while completing a master’s degree, and eventually returned to film as well. That return made the medium feel personal again.

Seeing in the shape of the camera

Garris works across formats, and each one changes the way he sees. Carrying a Hasselblad makes the world feel square. A panoramic camera makes horizontal relationships more visible. Large format slows the entire encounter further.

Because much of his work is black and white, he pays close attention to light, form and texture. The camera is not simply recording a place; its format determines the visual questions he asks of it.

The bayou that keeps giving

One place in coastal Mississippi has become especially important. Garris first reached the bayou by following a vague trail, pushing through heavy brush and past large banana spiders. He emerged into late-afternoon light and enormous live oaks and immediately exposed a full roll of 6×9 film.

Nearly every frame became something he later printed in the darkroom.

He has returned to the bayou whenever he visits southern Mississippi, and each visit produces new photographs. Over time, the place has become less a location than an ongoing body of work. Garris hopes eventually to make a book from the images accumulated there across the years.

Making the photograph by hand

Analogue photography matters to Garris because it allows him to make an image from beginning to end with traditional tools. The connection becomes strongest in the printing stage, where the photograph remains a physical object shaped by decisions in the darkroom.

Film also leaves room for accidents. One wet roll became unexpectedly important after he used it to photograph a solar eclipse. When developed, the emulsion had melted and lifted, surrounding the sun with damage he could never have designed deliberately. The failure became one of the most striking photographs he had made.

Memory measured in miles

Garris often remembers travel through photographs. In 2022 he drove roughly 8,000 miles across the United States, photographing along the way. The trip included iconic landscapes, illness from Covid, nights sleeping in the car and an almost continuous final drive home.

Looking at those photographs does more than remind him of individual views. They reconstruct the physical experience of the journey and make him want to get back in the car.

Looking closer to home

For years, like many landscape photographers, Garris imagined the most important scenery was somewhere else—especially in the American West. Age and repetition changed that assumption.

Georgia, Florida, Mississippi and the wider Gulf Coast increasingly became the places he wanted to understand. He is now assembling work for a book about Mississippi, Louisiana and Florida while also photographing the Appalachian culture around Dahlonega, Georgia: festivals, music gatherings and people participating in local traditions.

His practice has therefore expanded from landscape toward documentary work without abandoning place as its central subject.

There is something to photograph here

Garris remembers students in a photography class complaining that there was nothing worth photographing near their college. A short trip down the road revealed landscapes they had never considered remarkable.

That story contains the idea at the centre of his work. A place does not have to arrive pre-certified as a photographic destination. It may simply require returning, paying attention and allowing familiarity to become depth rather than invisibility.

Developing Stories is a Berlin Photo Studio editorial series about the people, memories and lives behind photographic practice.