Brent Galen Adkins
Brent Galen Adkins was raised in a household that treated creativity as something worth taking seriously. Their mother was an avid reader, and both parents and grandparents consistently supported early artistic curiosity, from childhood drawing projects to building a screen-printing press and selling shirts locally. When Adkins went away to art school, their family bought them their first camera during a weekend visit home, a small but formative gesture that reinforced the idea that creative work mattered.
In the early stages of developing a visual language, Adkins relied heavily on studying and referencing artists they admired, absorbing what resonated and gradually letting go of what did not. Over time, those influences blended into a more intuitive process, one shaped by experimentation, self-critique, and an ongoing willingness to evolve. That process remains central to how they work today.
Adkins earned a BFA from Rowan University in 2016, concentrating on photography and illustration. While their academic focus began with still imagery, the practice later expanded into performance video informed by photographic sensibilities. During college, an internship with a mentor who emphasized comedy, absurdity, joy, and art as a form of community care left a lasting impact. That influence became especially important when Adkins returned to making work after an extended post-college hiatus.
A major shift in their practice occurred when a friend asked them to document a queer dance party. Although Adkins had long been present in similar spaces and appreciated the photography surrounding them, they had not previously considered participating as a documentarian. A few hours into the night, they became drawn to the medium’s ability to capture celebration, vulnerability, and connection under intimate, unpredictable lighting. This experience led to portrait work centered on community members and eventually expanded outward into the surrounding city.
Another turning point came during a camping trip, when casual vacation photographs developed into a deeper interest in the relationship between people and their environments. Adkins became attentive to how landscapes are cultivated, memorialized, and reshaped, and how they respond in return. This inquiry began to parallel their thinking about queer community, resilience, and belonging. Clarity emerged when they stopped over-explaining intent and focused instead on documenting what felt meaningful.
Their practice is intuitive and observational. Adkins follows light, responds to curiosity, and pays attention to moments of physical excitement that arise while working. Portrait subjects are often met through friends, community spaces, and dance floors, with collaboration playing a key role in shaping images that feel chosen rather than imposed. Many photographs emerge from everyday movement, walks, commutes, errands, through sustained attentiveness rather than staged scenarios.
An ongoing project, Afters, has been especially influential. The work slowed their pace, encouraged wandering, and pushed them beyond familiar social patterns, deepening connections to neighborhood, community, and city. Though logistically demanding, the project has fostered meaningful relationships and contributed to a growing visual record of people who want to be seen as they are.
At its core, Adkins’s work centers on community, intimacy, resilience, and interdependence, between people and between people and place. Their long-term goal is to develop bodies of work that live beyond individual images, eventually taking form as books and exhibitions. Through photography, they seek to translate lived feeling into visual language and to affirm the importance of the people and spaces they choose to document.
