Photographic Memory: Justin Carney Explores How Grief Affects Families

As a young man, Justin A. Carney, MFA’24, tried to ignore feelings of loss. These days, however, the photographic artist takes the concepts of memory, impermanence, and grief head-on. “All of my work surrounds and deals with grief,” he says.

Raised in Baltimore by a single mother, along with his grandmother, Carney began photographing his family in earnest near the completion of his BFA from the Pennsylvania College of Art and Design. He says his recent body of work imagines “a future where the rest of my family has passed, and I’m the one left behind. Memory is really important for that project, which is why the photos take on the shape that they do.”

That shape feels simultaneously impermanent and indelible. Carney’s images have a distressed, ghostlike quality, and achieving that effect takes considerable time. The first step involves sandpapering parts of images. Then, Carney intentionally prints photos on the non-printable side of clear photo paper. He’s left with a distorted image which he further distorts by painting the surface with water. “Then I smoosh that up against another clear photo paper—but onto the printable side—so that the inks move over,” he says. “For one singular image, I’ll make a bunch of different versions of the same thing,” he continues. “Then I take photos of all of those physical versions and [digitally] layer parts of them together.”

The last step? Printing the final, haunting image.

The following interview with Justin Carney was conducted in early summer 2024. See more of his photographic images.

I was looking at the distressed quality of your photographic images and I’m curious to know a little about your process. Are you doing that mechanically or digitally? How do you create these very ghostly, ethereal effects? And then, if you could explain how this connects with the grief aspect in your work?
Justin Carney: I’ll start with the grief aspect of it. So, yeah, a lot of my work, like, all of my work surrounds and deals with grief. And it’s grief surrounding my grandmother’s death—she passed away in 2011.

For about, like, six years or so, I had tried to ignore those feelings—dealing with those feelings of loss. And, when I was in undergrad, I actually, you know, I was coming close to graduation. I wanted to make something that was meaningful to me, and I started taking pictures of my family. And I started to question, like, why I was so interested in taking pictures of my family. Because of my grandmother’s passing, I wanted to capture moments before these people were no longer here.

And, so, that transitioned into—I started thinking about why I was making those photos, and I saw that it was tied to my grandmother and her death. And, so, then I started to kind of get down this rabbit hole of trying to explore and understand grief within my whole family. And that started with me interviewing my grandmother’s children—so, my mom and her siblings—to really learn about how they were dealing with that passing.

That’s, like, one of the first body of works that I really realized, which was Those Left Behind. So, that dealt with my grandmother’s children.

Then, the next body of work, and the disappearing has become, which is more so those ghostly images, that body of work is more so imagining a future where the rest of my family has passed and I’m the one left behind. And, so, I’m questioning, “Who will I become when they’re no longer here? Who will I be when I’m no longer able to remember?” Memory is really important for that project, which is why the photos take on the shape that they do.

So, the process. The process is—it’s a pretty lengthy process. I’m doing different things. So, I am sanding with sandpaper on the physical print. And then another technique that I’m doing is, like, a photo transfer technique where I’m using clear photo paper. So, with the clear photo paper, there’s a printable side where the ink actually absorbs into the paper and sticks. And then there’s a non-printable side where the ink just doesn’t—it just sits on top of the paper, and you can move it around. So, I print on the non-printable side and then paint with water. That moves that ink around. Then, I smoosh that up against another clear photo paper—but onto the printable side—so that the inks move over.

That’s two parts of the process, which is a physical process. And I usually, for one singular image, I’ll make a bunch of different versions of the same thing. Then I take photos of all of those physical versions, and I bring them all into Photoshop and layer parts of them together to create a whole new image. And, so, that’s the process. Then I print that new image. So, none of the physical things are actually seen. Those physical manipulations that I’m doing—the audience only sees that final, new image that really can’t exist physically.

I’m really struck by what you’ve captured in these images. You get a sense of someone being there, now they’re not there, but they are still there. How long did it take you to develop this process?
JC: To refine the process took maybe three years—to really understand everything about it. So, the way that I stumbled across it was with the sanding. When I came into the MFA program [at IU] in 2020, I had a cohort who—he wasn’t sanding his images. He was doing a darkroom process which kind of deteriorated the image, but, when I saw his work, it looked like certain parts had been sanded with sandpaper. With that thought, I began experimenting with sanding and I really connected to it.

And then with the transparency—the clear photo paper photo transfer technique. We were given—I think the second year in my MFA—we were given this task to do that would result in an exhibition at the end of the semester. It didn’t come to fruition, but that’s what it was.

The exhibition had to deal with abstraction. And, so, when I was an undergrad, I actually saw a lot of students make the mistake of printing on the wrong side of clear photo paper. It looked really cool at the time—you know, I had that thought within me.

And, so, then it came out with this exhibition that we were supposed to put on. I experimented with—at first, what I was doing was just printing on the wrong side so that the ink is still active, smooshing that a bit against the printable side of another sheet and that was it. That’s all I was doing at first.

Then I had a different cohort who was also working with transparency film. She was printing on the wrong side and painting with water. But her struggle was that she didn’t have any way to—she couldn’t figure out how to get the image to stay. And, so, I met with her. I asked her to show me her process. I showed her my process, which was, like, smooshing the two together. And, so, I ended up taking a part of her process, which was the painting with water, and putting it into my own process, the smooshing the two sheets together, to create this kind of whole new process.

She ended up not going forward with her process anymore. She ended up doing something else. So, I kind of learned from her and worked it into my own thing. And then the Photoshop aspect was just—oh, man—a lot of experimentation.

How did that feel when you finally hit on the first image where you accomplished what you wanted to accomplish?
JC: So, the first image —I can actually tell you what it is, and you can go see it [online.] So, it’s an image called Home. That was the very first one that I ever made using that photo transfer process. And I don’t feel like I’ve made anything that is as good as this. Like, I’m always chasing this. It was a complete and total mistake, right? This was me not knowing at all what I was doing—complete experimentation in the beginning—trying to figure it out.

I was in my mom’s house in Baltimore, and I had this big bowl of water. Just a bowl filled with water. And, so, I printed one sheet out on my printer and then I dunked another sheet just right into that bowl of water. Then I smooshed the two together, and it just created this really, just dreamy—ah! Then I took photos of that, brought it into Photoshop, started experimenting with the layers, and wound up with this. And, yeah, like I’ve tried doing the whole dunking one sheet fully in water again, and it just does not come out like this. But yeah. When I did this, I was just blown away. And I was like, this has to be the process. This is the process.

When did you start doing photography and how long have you been an artist?
JC: Oh, man. Those are hard questions. So, my family—there’s always been cameras in my life, right? Like people taking pictures of family events and things. Even me with the little disposable cameras. And I would take pictures of my friends sometimes when we go out skateboarding with the little disposable cameras. Around that time, I wasn’t really—I would say I didn’t start thinking about how photography could be utilized as an art form until maybe high school—10th grade or so—when I took a photo class—my first ever photo class in the dark room. Very magical experience. And, when I started, I wasn’t that good.

Figuring out camera controls, compositions—really hard stuff—and I struggled with that. But I fell in love with that struggle and that challenge.

And I just kept with it after that class. After that class, I got—my mom bought me my first personal film camera. I was just taking pictures of everything. At first, I actually wanted to be a photojournalist.

I didn’t really know, like, in what ways photography could be used as art other than journalism, because that was mainly the photos that I saw and knew. And, so, I was going for that up until undergrad. I was—so, from high school, after high school, I went to community college. I was in community college for about five years, and I just had the goal of, “OK, I’m going to be a photojournalist.” And then when I got to undergrad—that was another five years. Taking the classes, talking with classmates and things like that, seeing different kinds of photos that weren’t just photojournalism but were used in different ways just kind of really opened my eyes to the many ways that photography could be used and the many ways that it can be made, too.

So, your early schooling—was that in Maryland?
JC: Yes. That was in Baltimore.

You hold a BFA in photography from the Pennsylvania College of Art and Design and now, you also have your IU master’s degree. And you moved at the end of June?
JC: Yeah, to Colorado.

What’s in Colorado?
JC: Teaching job. Very exciting stuff! I’m teaching photo classes—I’m actually the head of the photo program, which is very intimidating, but also very exciting—at Colorado State University.

Congratulations!
JC: Thank you.

Do you have a dream subject or project for the future that you would just love to tackle? And, if so, what would that be?
JC: I’m actually working on a project currently. It’s hard to ever dream up future projects, but this project that I’m working on currently, I’m expecting to take upwards of, like, 10 years to actually uncover everything.

I’m going to be researching my family history. So, how a lot of my artworks have been focused on my grandmother— surrounding this one person—I’m more so trying to understand where my family comes from over generations and, like, generational lives, things like that.

So, I’m trying to figure out where are the places that we’ve lived and the interactions that we’ve had, how we fit into African American history, things like that. Something that I actually found out recently was that my family is actually related to one of the oldest documented African American families called the Quanders. Yeah, very, very cool stuff. Not a lot of people in my family know. I was talking with my cousin, and he told me that.

So, it’s going to be a lot of detective work then?
JC: Oh, yeah. And I’m not the greatest at research. That’s why I’m thinking it’s going to take a while.

Written By
Susan M. Brackney
Susan M. Brackney, BA’94, has been a professional writer since 1995. A member of the American Society of Journalists and Authors, she has written four nonfiction books, including Plan Bee: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About the Hardest-Working Creatures on the Planet.