An image that hovers between documentation and abstraction created by Eskenazi School M.F.A. student Justin A. Carney has taken top honors in a prestigious international photography competition. Carney, a third-year graduate student in photography, was awarded first place in the Single Image category of LensCulture’s 2023 Art Photography Awards. Titled “Home,”­­­­ the award-winning piece from his series “and the disappearing has become” is a domestic interior whose distressed patina strains the viewer’s navigation past coffee table clutter to a ghostly odalisque and the textured stucco wall behind her.   

Carney’s work was selected by a jury of eight including curators, magazine editors, and gallery owners from the U.S., the U.K., the Netherlands, and Germany. He was among 40 artists from 20 countries on five continents honored with this year’s LensCulture Art Photography Awards. Based in Amsterdam and Berkeley, LensCulture is an established resource for contemporary photography with an international audience of over three million people.

“To be recognized on a global stage, particularly on LensCulture, with so many other amazing photographers is unbelievable,” said Carney. “I feel like my life is telling me, ‘Everything is good, just keep making art.’ Not because of possible fame or anything but because the work is being seen, my work is talking with people, people are connecting to it.”

Originally from Baltimore, Maryland, Carney is a recipient of 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.

Bloomington’s Lotus Education and Arts Foundation exhibited Carney’s autobiographical series “Those Left Behind” in December 2022. More squarely situated in the reportorial genre, the photographs in “Those Left Behind” comprise portraits of his family members, domestic interiors, and still lifes of their personal effects made after the passing of his grandmother, the family’s matriarch.

Read an interview with the artist about “Those Left Behind."

Of this series Carney speculated that “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.” That intimacy was reinforced at the Lotus installation with recordings of family members murmuring through the gallery, evoking the image of huddled conversations collected over time.

In his series “and the disappearing has become,” Carney takes his leave of straight photography while retaining his thematic focus. “Since the death of my grandmother, I’ve become a sort of studier of grief,” said Carney. “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.” In the “disappearing” images, Carney uses alternative techniques including monoprinting, sanding the surface, and manipulating photo ink. 

Making these pictures is a three-step process. “I print an unaltered image and physically manipulate it in different ways -- sanding the print with sandpaper and painting water onto what’s called transparency film (clear photo paper),” Carney explained. “One side of transparency film doesn’t allow ink to adhere to it so it can still be moved or completely wiped away. I print on that side and paint with water to get that runny ink look.

“The results of these experiments are one-of-a-kind,” Carney continued. “I photograph all the things I made, bring them into Photoshop, and layer them to create a completely unique and abstracted image -- essentially bringing fragments together to make an incomplete whole. But this new image is reproducible; I can make any number of prints.”

 The resulting scenes show a post-apocalyptic world whose subjects, such as the reclining figure in “Home,” seem to have vaporized. But rather than simply “disappearing,” their absence is marked. This world holds the space they once occupied.

It’s a distinction that can’t be captured in straight photography. How, after all, could you take a photo of the gash your beloved’s passing rips through the world? Or capture a loved one and all your feelings about that loved one with a click of the shutter?

In his award-winning image “Home,” Carney has carved out the reclining figure of his aunt to an ectoplasmic silhouette, haunting a space filled with her things. “The work is a visualization of memory and forgetting after the death of a loved one,” Carney said. He described the series as a thought experiment, “imagin[ing] a future where my family has passed, and I work through that grief.”

The artist processes those feelings through his formal manipulations, creating a topsy-turvy landscape where things go in and out of being recognizable. Abstraction and representation “inform each other,” Carney said. “And the in-between space they create, an image frozen in a state of transition, is to express that grief and healing are forever processes. They do not simply end; they continue. And forgetting is one part of that process. It’s a fluid existence.”

“By hand-manipulating the image, Carney is dismantling the representational language of photography to question its ability to accurately reflect the past and form reliable memories,” commented David Ondrik, lecturer in photography in the Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture + Design in IU's College of Arts and Sciences. “The dissolution of the image reflects the inevitable dissolution of memory and foregrounds photography’s inadequacy at truthfully representing the past, especially when experiencing the grief of a family member’s death.”

While dealing a blow to the conventional conceit that photography captures a world “out there,” Carney’s images simultaneously amplify the medium’s power to convey extra-retinal meaning. “The instability of photographic materials,” for example, can serve as “a metaphor for the slipperiness of human memory,” as LensCulture wrote.

Being recognized at this level is “humbling, exciting, dizzying, and beautiful,” Carney said. “I’ve applied to LensCulture Awards so many times and never got in, you know, so I thought it would never happen.

“If I had to give some advice, I would say, ‘just apply, you never know what could happen,’” Carney offered. “To do something is to create change, even if it cannot be seen. Also, keep making art, hold onto that joy of making art. Because even the art with deep and sad emotions is joyful. Art’s fun, I promise.”

Carney will exhibit his series “and the disappearing has become” as part of his M.F.A. thesis show at the Grunwald Gallery April 4-15.  On Friday, April 7 the gallery hosts an artists’ talk at noon and an opening reception from 6-8 p.m.

Learn more about the M.F.A. shows and all Eskenazi School events

For more information please contact

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