Navigating grief: MFA photographer Justin Carney's "Those Left Behind"

On view at the Lotus Foundation gallery in downtown Bloomington, Justin A. Carney's autobiographical photographic series "Those Left Behind" explores his family's grief and disconnection after the death of his grandmother.

Currently a third-year M.F.A. student in the Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture + Design, Carney is originally from Baltimore, Maryland. Carney received the Reva Shiner Memorial Award in the 2022 National Society of Arts and Letters Competition and Exhibition and the Best in Show Award in the 2020 Emerging Vision: Biennial Student Show at the Colorado Photographic Art Center. His work has been exhibited nationally and abroad, including in China and South Korea.

"Those Left Behind" opens Friday, December 2 from 5-8 p.m. at the Lotus Education and Arts Foundation, 105 South Rogers St. Gallery hours are December 3, 12-3 p.m. and December 6, 8, 13, and 15, 2-6 p.m.

YK: Your exhibition at the Lotus Firebay, “Those Left Behind,” is an intensely personal, autobiographical set of images. You have explained that you made this work as a way to cope with the impact on your family of losing your grandmother, the family's matriarch. How does it feel to exhibit this very personal work, to do this personal processing in public?

JC: Truthfully, it’s scary. The reason for that is because it’s not only me on those walls, it’s not only my feelings that I’m trying to express. It’s my family, my mother, uncles, and aunt, their feelings, their pains, and of course their joy, but that’s a hard thing to juggle. Photography is something that helps me understand the world and people around me, as well as myself. I’m not one to talk too deeply about my feelings in person so photography is how I talk about them, how I work through them. When I make the work, all I’m thinking about is myself – there’s no one I have to show it to, I can just figure things out as I go along. But this is the first time that this work will be up in a public space and so many people will be talking about it.

It will also be the first time some of my family sees it – that’s the most scary. Because I want them to be able to see how much love and care I put into this work and to see how I’ve been coping with my grandmother’s – their mother’s – death, and for them to see how I see them. Which is with love. But things can be misunderstood and so that possibility worries me with them. Other people misunderstanding or seeing something different is okay for me because that’s art. You’ll see what you see. Although one thing I do want people to see is that these people that they are getting a glimpse of are human. Death affects and will affect us all.

YK: Even though the subjects of these pictures are your family members, this work has a documentary quality—like photojournalism—and the pictures are usually accompanied by captions, stories, or quotes. What is the difference between these pictures and photojournalism?

 JC: That’s a good question, a tough question. My definition of photojournalism is more so simple documentation of what happened, when it happened, and how it happened. Photojournalism often tries to take more of an objective view. Whereas the work that I make is very subjective and personal. The photographs themselves are not concerned with facts, they are concerned with emotion and connection.

The photographs have a heavy focus on hope with undertones of grief. A lot of the light in my images is soft, a lot taken as the sun is setting. It’s a hopeful light, it’s not stark. I imagine this light standing in for my grandmother. The captions, being quotes from interviews I did with my family to find out how they were coping with their mother’s passing, are also very subjective and personal. There’s not a factual outline of events. The words and images are fluid in that way, they recall, they imagine, they grieve, and they laugh. It’s quite possible I’m on the borderline of documentary but quite often a documentarian doesn’t want you to know they exist behind the camera. I think in my work - I would hope – you can see that I exist with my family, not at a distance from them.

YK: Since you had intimate access to the subjects of these pictures, how did you negotiate the topic of consent? How do your family members feel about having their most intimate and sometimes painful moments documented and shared in your work? How does it feel to you now that they are on the wall? 

JC: My family is very supportive. It always surprises me how much. They are always open to take photographs. Even when they are sick and tired of me taking photos, they always give me a bit of their time. I’m very lucky in that respect. Some people have lots of pushback with their families. My negotiation of consent – or rather how much I should share – is a back and forth and debating with myself. They’ve put so much trust in me that I have to really sit and consider what is important to be known so others can connect, and what do people have no business knowing. I’m the one who is left to figure that out. Which makes me want a little more restriction with them, but I’m grateful.

There are some boundaries that I do respect though, and it’s not hard to respect. I don’t have an interview about my grandmother from my aunt and that’s because she didn’t want to do it. I respected that, and she allowed me to take photos. And even with all of that trust, I still ask them what they do or don’t want to do. I also make it known that they don’t have to do something if they don’t want to.

I actually think my family enjoys that I share our lives, even the painful moments, because they understand that it helps me and I think when I make this kind of work, interviewing them about their mother, taking pictures in their spaces, together and separate, it helps them too. I think it helps all of us release what none of us knew we were holding in. I also think they like just seeing my perspective on things. I’m not too sure they think too deeply on how the work exists and is taken by other people. They’re just so happy and proud that I’m making moves.

And this move with this solo show feels like a long time coming. I feel relieved and thankful that this work can connect to a larger audience than just my classmates. I want my work to be a comfort for others, so people know they’re not alone in this world, there are others who understand how they feel, and that death and grief isn’t the end – it doesn’t have to be the end. This show is my first step to connecting with others.

YK: To what extent is your interest anthropological? Are you interested in capturing the very specific place and time and experience of this particular multi-generational Black family in Baltimore while at the same time speaking to the big issues confronting every family?

JC: Oh yes, most certainly. To the whole extent, I think. My professor (I can’t remember which – I think it was Eric Weeks) told me once that the most personal things are most often the most universal, and I believe deeply in that. One my other professors, Dr. [Maria Hamilton] Abegunde [who is Assistant Professor, African American and African Diaspora Studies at IU-Bloomington] told me that autoethnographic work is asking questions of yourself in order to connect back to a larger context because identity is forged through community. Hearing those two things really helped me to continue making the work I do.

Of course, every family is different. We all have our unique set of circumstances, our quirks, and belief systems but there is no person that will not experience death and/or grieve for something (not even necessarily a death). Everyone will experience some kind of shift in their relationships. These are universal experiences, not even specifically familial. There is something that we can learn from each other. What that thing is will be different for each person as they come to the work, but we can learn much about ourselves through learning about others. I think that’s a beautiful thing. 

YK: Many of your images include photographs as subject matter—whether framed studio portraits on a credenza, photos on graphic tees, pictures stuck to the refrigerator, or a portrait on a funeral service program. As such, your work becomes a commentary on the medium itself. It seems this family navigates life by way of photos – that they serve a wayfinding role, and a talismanic one. Would you say that the photograph plays an outsized role in your family, or if this is a photographer’s meditation on the medium and its power to connect and heal? 

JC: I like that, “navigates life by way of photos.” I think that’s very much true. My family has a close connection with photography. I like to say that the camera was another family member in our lives growing up. We have so many photos and photo albums in our house. I’ve taken most of them with my creation of my work, many of the photos of my grandmother that are in the show are copies of album photos.

The images that include photographs as subject matter do speak on the power that photography holds to connect people and the meaning they can hold for people. For example, the one image of my grandmother’s obituary in my mother’s purse talks specifically about that. In the interview I did with her, she told me how having that image in her purse offered her a sense of comfort, by keeping that object, that photo, close, it feels like her mother is always there with her and that she’s never truly gone.

Photographs are very personal and relational objects. One photo may mean the world to someone and not mean much of anything to someone else. But I think that is a special and beautiful thing. Every person will have their own unique relationship to the same and different photos, even among siblings, just the same as they have their own unique relationships with each other. I think this relationality of photography holds that power of connection and connection being a path to healing.

YK: Your portfolio includes different photographic directions. While this series ("Those Left Behind") is mostly portraiture, and goes toward something that looks like straight documentation or photojournalism with text, this is not the only direction your work has taken. In the body of work called “and the disappearing has become,” you use alternative techniques such as monoprinting and erasing with sandpaper to create abstract and semi-abstract images. And the ongoing series you call “The Embodiment” includes a lot of evocative nature shots, some atmospheric like Stieglitz, many with captions. 

All of your series are elegiac, it seems to me, and meditate on the ethereal and the ephemeral nature of life (which of course lends itself to the medium of photography very well). Is this the throughline in your work? If not, what prompts you to make work? 

JC: That is one of the throughlines within my work, yes. Since the death of my grandmother, I’ve become a sort of studier of grief. It was a large shift in my and my family’s life, losing her. And so, I’ve been trying to understand that shift, to make sense of life, to find life. “The Embodiment” is about my relationship with loneliness and emptiness, “Those Left Behind” focuses in on the grief, the continued life after my grandmother’s death, and found joys of my family, and “and the disappearing has become” presents a questioning of spirit and in what ways our loved ones remain even after death. “and the disappearing has become” is what I’m currently working on. It is very different work for me, not only in terms of form but also in digging into certain fears that I have surrounding death. It’s a very visceral process for me.

But yeah, my work is very connected to my grandmother and my family, their love, their struggles, and their perseverance. There have been many times that I don’t know what to make and so I sit down and make a list of the things that are most important to me. My family keeps hitting the top of those list, and so it only makes sense to focus on them. I’ve been wanting to make landscapes for a long time now but my lists keep telling me I have more I need to unpack here first. I look forward to those landscapes someday though.  

YK: What brought you back to grad school and what have some of the most valuable aspects been of your time at the Eskenazi School?

JC: I have been in school for way too long, honestly. And always studying photography. From community college to undergrad to now. My teachers suggested I go to grad school. They’d tell me how well I’d do in grad school. I think I’ve done pretty well. But I chose to go to grad school because, at the time, I was very interested in being a professor. Grad school is the surest way. And I also just love learning, so grad school made sense. And I’ve learned a lot, so much. Some of the most valuable aspects… my professors pushing me to apply to shows, I was so scared to apply to things… my times taking Black Studies classes with Dr. Abegunde, those were some of the most eye-opening classes in my life… and being able to meet and talk with so many different people, classmates, students, people from the Eskenazi Museum, professors, gallery directors, so many. The opportunities and insights have been amazing. Of course, there’s much more but that’s just a few. I’m very grateful to have been able to come here.  

For more information please contact

Yaël Ksander
Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture + Design
(812) 855-5512
yksander@iu.edu