Billie Carter-Rankin (b.1995) is a visual artist from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She experiments with photography, darkroom processing, and archived images to explore loss within personal and collective memory. Her work primarily focuses on the absence of information, and the potential that is created as a result of that absence. Carter-Rankin has contributed to publications such as TIME Magazine, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Oxford American, and The Guardian. Her work has been recognized on The most memorable New York Times illustrations lists for 2022 and 2023, as well as the Best of 2022: Artist Illustrations list for The Guardian US. She graduated with a MFA in Photography from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2020, and her bachelor’s degree in Media, Journalism, and Film from Howard University in 2018.
Artist Statement
The process of remembering is a universal experience. Over the course of time, old routines evolve into new iterations, as do the materials and methods used to hold memory. Growing up, I would flip through my grandparents’ photo albums, in awe of seeing the rituals and celebrations they chose to document and preserve. When I asked my grandparents for more context about these events, there were many details they couldn’t recall. Our family photographs, originally meant to function as a site of memory, transformed into sites of forgetting. How does one come to understand an archive with limited information, specifically an archive from a different time period?
When selecting images, my focus is specifically on significant archived events, rituals, and traditions cherished by my family, or significant eras that have influenced my family. By using these images, the archive becomes a reflection that allows me to view my own identity in parallel with my ancestry. I scan and reproduce the original gelatin prints of selected photos and reprint them into inkjet paper, modernizing the image. I age the print by applying chemistry, typically used for preservation, to distress it—forming a unique kind of alchemy of my own. Reprinting the images at their original size, I question whether they will be perceived as the original gelatin images, or readily recognized as reproductions. Through this transformation of renewal and aging, I consider the fragility of the photographic materials used to preserve memory, and how this temporality influences how the image is interpreted.
When sourcing and manipulating these images, I consider how an image continues to live and evolve as technology shifts - almost as if the image itself is on a timeline of evolution. Is the new physical form of these images, as contemporary reprints aged by my own intervention, providing an opportunity for new stories to be explored, or is it exposing the temporality of photographic material, and ultimately, the temporality of memory?