September 2024 AIR: Billie Carter-Rankin
Billie is exploring photography as monumental objects
Hello Billie! We are so glad you are joining us in the lab as our September Resident! I really appreciate that your work is so personal yet so universal. As you think about the process of remembering, how do you go about holding onto memories through photography?
I’m excited to join as well. Lately, I’ve been thinking about photographs as monumental objects. As I look through my family albums, I realize that many of the people and places depicted are not here anymore. I look at these images as a testament/tribute to the fact that they were here, they existed, they lived - and here’s proof! And because they lived, I live! I’m here! It makes me want to be more intentional about how I document my life, and what kind of archive I want to leave behind.
As dementia has entered your grandparents lives did you feel a shift in how you were capturing and transforming the images of their memories?
I felt a sense of urgency. The funny thing is, they didn’t. My grandfather passed before I was able to start this work, but when I kept asking my grandmother about her childhood, the early days of dating my grandfather, her move to Milwaukee, etc. she would be so disinterested. I would prep and ask her the most in-depth, thought-out questions a first year grad student fresh out of a critique could come up with, and she would give me one - maybe two - sentences at best sometimes. My grandmother wasn’t the overly-sentimental type, but it still threw me off how much she didn’t care about talking about the past. But if you asked her about the current politics at the time (she loved watching MSNBC) or the pandemic, or a hairstyle she didn’t like (there were a lot), she was an open book. I think about that a lot now. I miss hearing her opinions.
Color and texture manipulation is really powerful in the images. How did this process come about in your practice?
At the time that I first started this project, I was writing/reflecting a lot about memory. I kept coming back to words like “deteriorate” and “fade,” and wanted those attributes to show up in the work. I also started thinking about what my grandparents’ archive meant to me, as someone two generations removed from the original context of the photos. When selecting images, my focus is specifically on significant archived events, rituals, and traditions cherished by my family. By using these images, the archive becomes a reflection that allows me to view my own identity in parallel with my ancestry. I scan and reproduce the original gelatin prints of selected photos and reprint them into inkjet paper, as a way to renew the image. I age the print by applying a color toner, typically used for preservation, to distress it—forming my own unique kind of alchemy. The color indicates how long the toner has been on the print. After the first 24 hours, the colors are vibrant - with bright oranges, purples, and red tones. As the toner settles into the print overtime, the colors slowly begin to mute, shifting to brown and dark gray tones. Through this transformation of renewal and aging, I consider the fragility of the photographic materials used to preserve memory, and how this temporality influences how the image is interpreted.
What rituals and habits do you have in place in your life to keep your memories alive?
I hold on to cards/written notes. They mean the world to me. That’s one thing I picked up from my grandparents. They filled up an entire kitchen wall of postcards, holiday cards, birthday cards from loved ones over the years. It was so normal to see hundreds of cards on the wall, I never thought twice about it until a few years ago. Handwritten notes are so personal and intentional to me. If you’ve ever sent me a handwritten note 9 times out of 10 I probably still have it. I have a card given to me by my grandmother’s best friend when I was 3. My grandmother and her best friend would always refer to each other as “buddy,” and when her best friend signed the card she wrote “To Billie, my little buddy.” I feel so loved every time I read it.
I also keep my old journals. I remember as a teenager I threw away my first diary because I thought what I wrote in it was so embarrassing, and I kick myself for that everyday! Every now and again I like to reread old journal entries to see what was going on in my head at certain points in my life. 20-year-old Billie teaches me so many lessons. She had some good advice.
Can you talk more about the absence of information in your work and how that relates to memory, memory loss and grief?
When going through family photos with my grandmother, my original goal was to ask her as many questions as possible to fill in the blanks for me on anything/one I didn’t recognize. But for a good chunk of them, she would tell me “Billie that happened so long ago - I can’t remember.” For most of these images, I’m working from a limited context. Even with witnessing all of these events in our family albums, there was only so much my grandparents could recall from those moments years later. No matter how many questions I asked, I would never know the full context. The image is documentation that an event happened, but any moments not recorded from that event are gone. Think of all the life that’s been lived, all the different versions of how an event happened that never got documented, or wasn’t preserved properly, or thrown away too soon. I guess this is where grief comes in for me. Is there such a thing as knowing a thing or a person in totality? Probably not. Whether we like it or not, information is lost all the time. There are memories, good and bad, that my grandparents had, that died with them. So how do we make sense of a thing - such as an archive - with limited context? This is what I’m interested in exploring with this work.
Billie Carter-Rankin
Billie Carter-Rankin (b.1995) is a visual artist from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She experiments with photography, darkroom processing, and archived images to explore loss within personal and collective memory. Her work primarily focuses on the absence of information, and the potential that is created as a result of that absence. Carter-Rankin has been featured internationally in exhibitions such as the Setouchi Triennial 2019 in Japan, and has contributed to publications such as TIME Magazine, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Oxford American, and The Guardian. She graduated with a MFA in Photography from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2020, and her BA in Media, Journalism, and Film from Howard University in 2018.