Katie Carder's Final Project

My recreation of photos in light boxes


Millie Wilson light box pieces

Family photos tend to have a much deeper meaning beyond that physical copy of the image. There is often a trove of personal associations bound up within these photographs. Upon looking at personal images there is a stimulation for all sorts of feelings, memories, and practices. It is in our human nature to view personal photographs as important, they can evoke a sense of control and efficacy. We feel as though, through photographs, we can cheat time or extend our memory past its natural expiration or inevitable decay. The photos I am using for the project seem to follow these same themes. When looking at them I have strange experiences with time, I know the people in these photos and it is hard to believe that they fit into my own timeline or the timeline before me. It feels so close to me yet so far away at the same time and in a way I feel like my memories are almost unreliable looking at these photos and yet not really knowing them. Photos from the decades past such as the 50s, 60s, and 70s have a certain sense of nostalgia. Everything seemed to be on the rise and the American dream was at its peak. Photos like the ones I have chosen and the ones Millie has chosen have an Americana aesthetic. These feel like such strong depictions of American culture and with that brings a sense of nostalgia that no one can quite put their finger on.  

Millie Wilson’s Untitled work of boys in the desert, is a part of her Light and Memory project. According to the Escalette’s blog post Wilson’s light box photos are a series of haunting and humorous works that poke at stereotypes, gendered situations, and the mundanity of everyday life. These are found photos that she has put in light boxes that allows the light to highlight the subjects and pours out into the outer world. With the added light, these images become haunting renditions of other people’s memories. These displays make the audience feel as though they are an intruder on past lives. Since the photos, their origins and their subjects are so ambiguous, it allows for the memories to belong to any viewer. The viewer has the opportunity to conceive any origin or context for the photo they desire. It becomes a collective experience for the audience. There is a certain sense of nostalgia when looking at these works, they are reminiscent of old family photos I am sure everyone has. They have a sort of familiarity to them that I feel anyone would be able to recognize. The dog dances in someone’s living room in front of a 70s era television set and the boys stare out from a backdrop of blue skies and red sands. They also seem kind of intimate, like maybe we should not be seeing them because they do not belong to us. They have this interesting sense of belonging and not belonging to the viewer at the same time, it is sort of disorienting. Wilson’s work also seems to capture the essence of old American culture. A collective identity and memory that many people living in the states today relate to, even if they were born after the time period these photos were taken. The light box adds a lot of interesting layers to the piece. The physical layers of aluminum, light, and color transparency are all drawn out of the image due to the light. These specific scenes are turned into ambiguous ones and moments that are normally frozen in time turn into endless memories that stretch back across generations. She describes her installations as unfinished inventories of fragments, improvisational, sites where the constructed and the readymade are used to question our making of the world through systems of language, knowledge, things and information (Sapp, Escalette Permanent Collection of Art at Chapman University). 

Millie’s found photos reminded me of photos I have seen of my family. I want to do my own set of images in light boxes inspired by Millie’s work. The first image on the page is one that I have found of my father and reminded me so much of the Untitled boy in the desert. I think it is so interesting how we can have such similar experiences and memories. The photos I am choosing are almost like found photos in a way because they are from my parents' stash of old photos and I had never seen them before. It was like seeing a part of their life and their memories that I was entirely unaware of. The photos really excite me because I feel like I can get a deeper, more personal connection to my parents and learn about them and their lives in a new way. 

  Bibliography

Information Technology Solutions. https://faculty.ucr.edu/~ewkotz/texts/Roy-1991-DearWorld.pdf. 

Kislinger and Kotrschal, Leopold and Kurt. “Hunters and Gatherers of Pictures: Why Photography Has Become a Human Universal.” Https://Www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Pmc/Articles/PMC8217823/, 2021. 

Sapp, Jordan. “Millie Wilson: Light and Memory - Art Installation in Smith Hall.” Escalette Permanent Collection of Art at Chapman University, 3 Nov. 2021, https://blogs.chapman.edu/collections/2021/11/03/millie-wilson-light-and-memory/. 

Teves, Haley. “Honoring LGBTQIA+ Artists in the Escalette Collection - Celebrating Chapman's LGBTQIA+ History Month.” Escalette Permanent Collection of Art at Chapman University, 15 Oct. 2019, https://blogs.chapman.edu/collections/2019/10/15/honoring-lgbtqia-artists-in-the-escalette-collection/.

Quan, Roy H. “Photography and the Creation of Meaning.” Art Education, vol. 32, no. 2, 1979, p. 4., https://doi.org/10.2307/3192343.

Wemmer, Todd J., et al. “Lost-and-Found Photos: Practices and Perceptions.”