Interview with Jen Everett
Images above from the series Redoubled/Something We Carry
Michael Rippy (MR): How did you get started in photography? What was your first experience where you thought, “I enjoy this, and it’s something I could see doing,” maybe even not as a career, but something that was always going to be a part of your life?
Jen Everett (JE): I grew up in the Metro Detroit area, and my family, especially my parents and grandparents, were very much engaged with making pictures and videos. I was always around photographs and not just the pictures themselves, but the act of looking back at those photographs through albums or gathering around on holidays and watching home videos. It was ever present, but I didn’t realize it was significant. I just thought everyone did that. Much later I realized, “Oh, this is something you can do for a living or as part of an overall creative practice.”
MR: That idea of growing up with the technology—it’s just like air, it’s just there, and I never really thought about that too much and about how accessible it made the medium for me. Like you said, it was just something that you always were around and something that you’d always done. How did you interact with other people that might not have had a similar experience? Even in work that you’ve created recently, you use those photographs as part of your art practice, so it’s just curious that it’s become so ubiquitous with your kind of history also.
JE: What I’ve noticed is that when people come to this particular work, they can always pinpoint someone who is the keeper of the images, someone who they can go to in their own family.
I’m really interested in that, maybe more so than in making new images. Before this I was doing a lot of portraiture, I’ve also done some documentary photography. But recently with this work—and when I say recently, I mean over the past five or six years—it’s really been about this archive that I’ve inherited. And also, an archive I’ve amassed of found, vernacular photographs. I think it’s something a lot of people gravitate towards. There’s like a kinship in that practice.
I also think technology and a shifting out of physical photographs changes us. Of course, we have purists who are very much engaged in working with film or in a darkroom, but the average person is often taking photographs with their phone. There’s something about that physical aspect of an image. Even if we’re looking at it online in a nonphysical way, there’s recognition that this is something from another time, it recalls something.
MR: How do you feel about this separation from a physical object that we have now? iPhones have become ubiquitous, which continues to make photography just a part of our daily life. How has that changed the way you look at the work, the things that your family had created and how you develop your work from that?
A lot of this stuff stays on the phone or goes straight on the internet, and there’s no physical connection with it. It’s just an image that flows up there.
JE: It changes, because I’m scanning actual photographs typically. Even that’s changing what it is, when you have this original photograph, you scan it in, maybe you scale it up. What I ended up creating are these collages, so that’s changing the meaning from that original capture, so to speak.
The relationship I have is complex. It’s something that’s hard to pin down. I definitely look at the photographs that I’ve inherited, and even the ones of unknown subjects I’ve collected, as precious. When I choose to reconfigure them some way through my work, it becomes less precious to me. It’s still significant. I’m an artist, and so I have an attachment, but the physical thing will always be more precious to me. I think that’s because it degrades over time in a way that the art object will not degrade; these photographs are literally turning to dust in a very material way.
It’s also two different things, two different types of media. I’ve heard people say this, and I think about it quite a bit. I agree that when you make a photograph, shooting it on film and processing it is much different than making an image digitally or on your phone. I don’t consider it a hierarchy. It’s just a different thing.
MR: It’s the idea that someone created, went to the trouble of taking the photograph, having a print made, and then held onto it. It’s not only precious to you, it was precious to the person that gave it to you. There’s some linear connection between you. The connection point is that photograph, even the things that you collect, you’re connected with whoever made that print or had that print made.
It may happen still with digital technology and even with Instagram, there may be some connection there, but the physical one is separated, because you know that same person held that photograph. There’s something different with the physical part of it that the internet or the digital medium may not allow us.
JE: Oh, for sure.
MR: It’s interesting to talk about these vernacular photographs that are out there already in the world and that have traveled through time in a way that these digital images haven’t.
JE: Yes. In some ways it’s similar because you’ll never know, even with the digital images. So many things are stripped of context as pictures go viral or become appropriated across media. If someone takes a screenshot and recontextualizes a photo through a meme, then you may never know the true origin of the actual image.
And with these vernacular photographs, the ones I collect and the ones I’ve inherited, there can also be distance or loss of context. Some images I know, but there are others in my collection that are a mystery. And the people who could tell me more are no longer present. It's unknown in that same way, but still precious. Or I still feel the need to take care of it.
MR: Family photographs are very odd objects. I have my own box full of old family photographs, and when I pull one out and see a picture of myself, and even having no memory of what I’m seeing, just that connection with a piece of paper with your picture on it is so strong and kind of visceral.
JE: Especially if it’s new to you. This has happened with my family before. I might have certain photographs, and family members have other pictures of the same event. You have an idea of what the event was, and your memory of the event is associated with that little archive of photographs you possess. When someone shows you another picture that wasn’t part of that, it unlocks something else. It activates a memory you didn’t even know was there.
MR: It’s such a strange thing that our mind does. It does the same thing with tastes. I’ve tasted preserves, and it takes me back to my grandma making jelly or preserves. It’s such a bizarre—and it’s so strong too that I just never understand it completely.
Let’s get back to your work. Some of the work, like you said, you collage together, and even that’s been manipulated to some degree. You’ll see photographs that have been folded and then put into this collage. Talk about how you approach that work versus the images that have this glitchy feel to them, which is actually what first attracted me to your work, just seeing the glitch, the weird mirrored images.
JE: What started me on this path has been the idea and experience of rupture, which I consider anything that makes you have to stop and reevaluate. That could be a great thing happening in your life, or it could be something that is not good or that shakes you up.
When my parents divorced, it left an archive in flux. And after my grandparents died, their pictures became part of it too. It was just so much information. And I always thought, “I’ll have time to work with this material as an artist.”
At one point, while my parents were divorcing and moving out of the house I’d grown up in, it dawned on me that this was urgent and that I didn’t have unlimited time. I went home with an empty suitcase, and I took what I could . . . what they didn’t want anymore. And I became the keeper of some of these photographs. At first it was too difficult for me to engage them. It was too much. Emotionally I was still too close, so I started looking at institutional archives. I started manipulating the material I found in those collections as a way to complicate the picture plane.
With this earlier work, I was thinking a lot about access. Some of the subjects I encountered in the collections made me question who could consent to a photo being made, and whose property it was.
I viewed these interventions, whether I was repeating, cropping, or changing the scale, as a way of giving the subject access but blocking the viewer from having that same access. All these images that institutions own are just out there, but what about the subjects of them? After working with those images for a while, it wasn’t enough, and I was missing that physicalness. But I still avoided my own archive. I started collecting vernacular photographs at thrift stores. I was explicitly looking for non-White people. I was looking for people who I perceived to be Black or Brown.
Initially, I didn’t find anything. All of a sudden, I started finding quite a bit and just collecting them and putting them through that same process of repetition and cropping. Eventually, I began glitching them through manipulation with the scanner. I started thinking more about rupture as a formal gesture and also the notion of the unknown and ambiguity. No matter how close we might feel to a particular object or image, there’s still a part of it that is unknown to us and will always be unknown.
That feeling is very strong when I go to a thrift store. Even if I see something familiar, I have no idea what trace is on it from someone else. I’m really interested in that because I think we’re so trained to want to know everything about something.
When people encounter my work, they want a story. They want a clear narrative, and sometimes there just isn’t one, or I don’t have access to it. I’ve had to accept that. Being Black in this country means that so much of our individual history has been cut off from the past and is unknown.
It's a position that can cause incredible grief, but it isn’t always just grief. As an artist, the unknown can afford me conceptual possibility. It’s like when you see a photograph and there is a caption. It assigns the narrative, and it is difficult to reverse once it has taken hold. If there’s no caption, your imagination is freed up. It can give you room and perhaps relief.
MR: You have images that feel like they’re really static, which are the ones that are mostly put into this montage that you have. The ones that are manipulated, the ones that are a little glitchy or repeat, somehow the repetition almost activates the images. Like the glitchy ones, they get some dimension, but they repeat as well.
There’s almost some activity, and it almost feels like the person in the image is communicating to you in some way that maybe they wouldn’t be able to, if it were just a single portrait. Also, the ones that are more repetitious and almost have like this film-still quality to them because of the motion involved—when I look at them, they become more active than if it were just a straight headshot. How do you feel about the idea that you’re imbuing them with some activity that wasn’t there before?
JE: I appreciate that comment. People have said that to me before, made that connection to motion or a filmstrip. Early on I was looking at, what are those images called? Stereos—
MR: Stereograph?
JE: Yes. I found one in a thrift store once. I was really interested in that doubling and how there was a slight shift because of the technology, and once you put it in the viewer and it merges them it gives this illusion of depth. That was the initial thing that pushed me to repeat the photographs. Something happens when you repeat an image.
I’m always looking closely, because I’m trying to determine whether they’re exactly the same. It’s forcing me to spend more time with the image and to look deeply. Because images are so ubiquitous, we don’t spend a lot of time with them.
If something is altered, even if just the scale has been changed, I notice how viewers respond, how I respond. It makes me want to get closer. It makes me want to try and figure out what’s happening and to slow down. That’s one thing I hope happens.
MR: It’s definitely happening. The idea that you are using a single still image and actually creating time, somehow you’re doing that through the repetition or through the manipulation. Because, like you said, if it’s one of the glitched images, and you go from left to right, you’re still trying to figure out, “Is something changing?” You have to commit some time in your brain to look through that image, scan the image in a way that you don’t normally scan the single self-portrait headshot.
It’s like when people invent something, you’re like, “Why didn’t I think of that? Why didn’t everybody think of that?” You’re doing the same thing here. Through that repetition, everybody should have been like, “Oh, well, of course, if you use a static image and repeat it three times, it’s going to suddenly create time.”
It’s interesting that you were doing that even with the glitch, and whether it’s intuitive as an artist that you’re somehow imbuing it with this time, or it’s completely intentional, either way, I completely respect. What really grabs your attention with these images is that repetition and like you said, doing more close looking once you get pulled into it.
JE: Thank you for that.
MR: What are you working on now, and what’s the next step for you in the fine arts realm?
JE: I’m getting the inkling that it’s time to bring the public component of this work to closure. Working with my family’s archive is something that I’m always going to do, it's life work. It’s so important to have a record. Clearly my family knew that, and so it has to continue. I’m in the very early stages of a moving-image project that will work with my family’s archive and specifically my dad’s contributions to it. My father made a lot of photographs and home videos, and he passed away last year. All the work I’ve made that appropriates his archive, I see differently now, I’m thinking about it on another level. I’m parsing through all of that.
It’s important for me to make this work. It’s a dedication to him. I’m in the midst of that daunting process of trying to understand what I’m doing and what I want to do. Because moving images are very different. I’ve made short, experimental works, but this will be longer form.
I’m digitizing VHS tapes, and negatives, sorting through the material itself, and writing. I think through figuring out what I have, the form of the film will come.
MR: I’m very interested in this idea of the therapeutic part of being an artist. Just being an artist alone is a very therapeutic thing, and more and more people should consider themselves artists, because you work through things in a much different way. Because you’re active, you’re using parts of your mind that you don’t normally use, when you’re an artist, and sometimes it’s very reflective, and like you said before, it starts to generate this bigger picture, and you start looking at things in different ways.
How do you feel about that process, that therapeutic process maybe, that you went through with your grandparents’ photographs and the time it took to get to it, to be comfortable with the idea? Then how that process works with what’s going on with the archive from your father?
JE: I think you’re right, it is therapeutic. You do have to give yourself the time, you can’t force it. Looking at the images my father made is helpful with the grieving process. I’ve had the realization that he was a talented photographer. These are really well composed, beautiful photographs he was making. In a way I was shocked, but I don’t know that I should have been shocked. This discovery is like communicating or collaborating. It’s really rich and helpful for me. I feel a responsibility to be tuned in and also to be constantly interrogating myself. These are images of loved ones who are now ancestors. I have to continue to question, “How is this functioning?”
There’s a lot of negotiating I have to do. Working with the found images along with images of loved ones helps me, because I want to have the same level of care, no matter what, whether I know the subject or not. Sometimes that means walking away from an opportunity because it doesn’t feel right to me.
I don’t make work out of every image I have in my collection. I also don’t source vernacular photographs online. I like to look for them and hold them in my hand. Some things I think I’m supposed to keep and care for in a certain way, that’s part of it too. It definitely feels like a culmination, it’s reaching towards the idea of closure.
MR: It’s interesting talking about the idea of public–private also and with the internet—and kids are reminded about this a lot—what’s personal and what’s public. It’s good to hear you talking about this idea of some personal morals and ethics related to, “What do I put out there? Whose story am I telling? Am I telling my story, or am I telling somebody else’s? How do I distinguish between that, and then should I even consider, should this story even be out there, or this image?”
A lot of the younger audiences need to hear that they don’t always need to share everything about themselves or other people in such a public way, and that you’re the gatekeeper not only for yourself but for others. Making that distinction is really important, and I think younger audiences will get a lot out of that. The reflection that you just had on the moral and ethical use of images in a way it becomes a commercial thing when you start going more public.
JE: It’s tricky, because I think back to my childhood and growing up. All of the media technology that we’ve passed through. I don’t know what my inclinations would be if I’d grown up in this time. I don’t know how I would see myself.
We’re all in it because we live in a world where you can’t avoid it. If everything I saw reflected back to me was as heavily mediated as it is now, I’d be a different person and a different artist. Not to reduce it to better or worse, but it does make me suspicious of putting certain parts of yourself out there just because it’s so easy to do and it’s so available to us.
I think we have to exercise some caution and restraint. You mentioned younger audiences, but anybody really. I’ve seen all kinds of folks caught up. I’m caught up in it too.
I remember the slowness, the lack of having fast-paced media or an instant way of doing everything. Now we’re able to access so much so quickly, you don’t have to remember much of anything. All of that affects how we see ourselves, how we see and relate to each other. We can take a lot for granted. I’m grateful I grew up in a time where I did have to wait for some things. If there was an episode of a show I really wanted to see but missed, I had to wait. [Laughs.] I had to wait until the rerun, or I just missed it, and it was okay. I think that teaches you something, but I can’t really explain it. Again, it’s not a binary. I dislike that way of thinking or the rigid generational finger-wagging. But I do think there’s a difference depending on the media you were exposed to, what went in and out.
I even think about some of the filters that are on our apps now, they’re trying to recapture the look of VHS tapes and contact sheets and these technologies that most people aren’t even using. Even in our very fast-paced world, there’s still a desire to look back or to have some relationship with older forms of media.
MR: One thing that jumped out at me when you were talking was the idea that you would be a completely different person with all this exposure that the younger generation has now. You feel that you wouldn’t be who you are today if you were living in the same environment these younger kids are living in. That’s really powerful; it shows how much power images and visual communication have.
JE: I’d be more anxious, and not that I don’t have a fear of the unknown now, but I'd probably have a lot more anxiety about how I perceive myself. I’m really grateful that, during childhood and adolescence, my family and loved ones had a practice of making lots of pictures and imaging themselves. The images I encountered through popular media were powerful, but I had this whole other set of images that were filtered through a lens of love and care. And that’s my foundation, more so than anything outside of it.
MR: Yes, and that goes back to the idea of therapeutic. These objects that are photographs are consoling, they are supportive. They keep you focused, in a way that if you didn’t have them, you could feel like you were almost never a part of anything. So that’s pretty significant.
We’ll wrap it up now. Is there anything that we haven’t covered that you feel you want to get out there and share with us?
JE: No, I think this has been a really great share. I appreciate it. Appreciate the time and the opportunity.
For information on the work of Jen Everett visit her website at https://jeneverettart.com/