Bil Brown
CONTACT
bilbrown@blackgreymag.com
Los Angeles, CALIFORNIA
Bil Brown is an American photographer, poet and filmmaker whose work treats photography as an act of embodied witness rather than representation. Working at the intersection of underground culture, political reality, and psychological descent, Brown rejects neutrality in favor of proximity, risk, and lived implication. His images emerge from within the situations he photographs, emphasizing presence, contamination, and the ethical tension of encounter.
Deeply influenced by Surrealism, post-Beat poetics, Provoke-era photography, and Bataillean notions of excess and transgression, Brown’s practice focuses on bodies, identity, and resistance as irreducible facts rather than abstractions. His work insists on the provable real in an era of synthetic imagery, positioning photography as a form of psychic, bodily, and historical record.
Notable works include MYLAR, an ongoing portrait and performance-based photographic series engaging identity, projection, and self-authorship through reflective and distorting surfaces; a decade-long body of protest and political photography documenting moments of civil unrest, state power, and collective resistance in the United States; Black & Grey Magazine, an early independent publishing project rooted in underground culture and counter-narrative image-making; and experimental film and narrative projects that merge documentary practice, poetics, and psychological descent. Across these works, Brown consistently emphasizes proximity, embodied risk, and the image as a record of lived encounter rather than representation or simulation.
Brown lives and works in Los Angeles. His work has been exhibited internationally and is included in the Leica gallery system, as well as the 100 year Leica Historical Timeline and frequently in LFI magazine, on podcasts and an instructor with Leica Akadamie.