On Brooke Palmer, the Friend

I met Brooke in 1991, during a road trip to Canada and the US.

Through my three years of living on and off in Canada between the years 1991 and 1994, we not only became friends, but he unconditionally opened his home and heart to my younger, wilder self; just when I needed a north, a direction.

When our paths crossed, Brooke, who just had started his young family, was already an established photographer and I was able to see him work when I observed him on two occasions in the studio and once during an industrial photography-shoot.

While I slept in his house next to his Darkroom, I woke every day to his impeccable work ethic during the early morning hours and this example of grit has instilled in me a lifelong knowledge of what “deep work” means and what endurance is needed when you create.

Brooke is the example of the stranger we wish our children meet when they travel and for whom we can never be grateful enough.

My gratitude is eternal.

On Brooke Palmer, the Artist

The artist Brooke has become is not surprising to me.

His work as one of the Film industries most desired still photographers, is inevitably intertwined with his parallel career as a creative artist.

While Brooke calls himself an “abstract expressionist painter”, I feel free to call him a “Master of Fearless Composition”.

Brooke has first treated his Photography as a craft which provides but during a career which now spans nearly forty years, Brooke could not escape the enduring observation of composition on film-sets, the framing of scenery and faces, colours and coincidence, tumultuous sound and silence.

Brooke describes his working on a film “as joining a mad circus where this incredibly talented family of entertainers and craftsmen come together to work feverishly for a short time to produce a piece of art. When the project is over the circus disbands and we look for a new circus to join”.

I could not be happier to welcome Brooke to the Circus of Inanna Modern and hope to help connecting him to the large family of Irish collectors and the wider European Art Market.

Holger Smyth

Skibbereen, Ireland, April 2023