Alex Chambers: This is Inner States, I'm Alex Chambers and, before we get started, I wanna give you a heads-up. Almost none of this episode takes place in the Midwest. It's about Baltimore. Apologies to those of you who come to Inner States only for our incisive, cliché-busting stories of Hoosier life. Next time, I promise we'll be back home again in Indiana.

Alex Chambers:  This episode is about Justin Carney. He's an artist. He recently finished an MFA at Indiana University. Hey, there we go! Justin's art is focused on his family. He takes photos of them and makes installations that explore regret, and grief and love. I went to talk to him in June. He was just wrapping up a stint teaching at the Herron School of Art & Design, and we were surrounded by boxes because he was getting ready to start as an assistant professor of photography at Colorado State University in Fort Collins. We talked about what his grandmother meant to his family, the slippage between grief and guilt, and why the challenges of making art can be a good way of working through all that.

Alex Chambers:  Justin got started as an artist because of his older brother. He went to Magnet Schools for Art, starting in middle school. That seemed like a good idea to Justin, so he applied to the same schools.

Justin Carney:  And I was always rejected. I got rejected from every single one. [LAUGHS]

Alex Chambers:  [LAUGHS]

Alex Chambers:  He'd wanted to follow in his brother's footsteps.

Justin Carney:  And everybody was like, "No, no." [LAUGHS] The schools were like, "You can't do that." And so there was a little bit of a chip on my shoulder. [LAUGHS]

Alex Chambers:  So, he went to a regular high school. It meant the art classes weren't as challenging as he wanted, but there was photography class. They got to develop film in a dark room. Seeing the photo appear felt like magic.

Justin Carney:  But I wasn't very good at taking photos, at creating engaging photos. Very hard. Composition's tough. [LAUGHS]

Alex Chambers:  Yeah. Uh huh.

Justin Carney:  As well as the manual controls, I didn't really understand them. And so it was a challenge and I loved not being good, and I loved that challenge. And it's still challenging now, especially composition. [LAUGHS] Especially composition. And so after I took that class, I took a whole bunch of other art classes too, but photography is really what stuck.

Alex Chambers:  Because it was the hardest?

Justin Carney:  Yeah, I guess that's why. It was the hardest thing. [LAUGHS]

Alex Chambers:  [LAUGHS]

Alex Chambers:  It was the hardest thing. So, he wanted to figure it out. His mom bought him his first film camera, and he started taking pictures of everything. When he finished high school, he wanted to go straight to get his Bachelor of Fine Arts, but his family didn't have the money. So he went to community college. He did that for about five years, and decided he wanted to be a photojournalist, because he thought for a photographer, that was all that existed.

Justin Carney:  I mean, other than wedding photography, which I definitely did not want to do.

Alex Chambers:  Then he got into a Bachelor of Fine Arts program, and suddenly his classes were about how to use photography as a form of personal expression.

Justin Carney:  And that really opened my eyes. What to do with that? I had no clue. But I know that I didn't want to be a photojournalist anymore. [LAUGHS]

Alex Chambers:  He kept taking art classes. He was liking it, feeling good. At a certain point, he realized people around him were starting to graduate, which meant he was getting close too. And the thing was, everyone else seemed to know what they wanted to do with their work.

Justin Carney:  And I didn't know. I had no clue. I was just doing assignments for classes.

Alex Chambers:  So he sat down, and made a list. What mattered to him. And the thing that kept coming back was his family. So, he started taking pictures of them. His mom and her sister and brothers. But then another question came up. Why was he doing this? Why was it so important to take these photos? Make these images to keep?

Justin Carney:  And then I started thinking about my grandmother. And then I started thinking about that guilt and the grief that was going on in my whole entire family.

Alex Chambers:  Something had happened in Justin's family. From the outside it might have looked like the normal course of life, but it changed things within the family. And Justin, whether he should have felt responsible or not, and I'm just going to say now, he definitely shouldn't have, he was carrying a lot of guilt.

Alex Chambers:  When Justin was growing up in Baltimore, his family was tight knit, emotionally and physically. When he was young he lived with his brother, his mom, his mom's brother, and their mother, his granny. Uncle Todd lived next door, aunt Cheryl and uncle Mark had their own houses nearby. They do cookouts at uncle Mark's, and then when Justin's mom got a place outside the projects, the gatherings moved to her place, probably because granny was there, still living with Justin and his mom and brother. Granny was the gravitational force at the center of it all.

Justin Carney:  She was just this very important figure, but she wasn't scary, you know? She kind of-- everybody gravitated toward her, even though she was pretty quiet.

Alex Chambers:  Justin's mom says she was so quiet that she didn't stand up for herself much. Not even with her kids.

Justin Carney:  But my uncle tells different stories. The oldest uncle, uncle Mark, says that they got in a fight with a neighbor together. That she stood up for herself, because this neighbor was causing problems, and was starting some stuff.

Alex Chambers:  Okay wait, can you tell that story?

Justin Carney:  [LAUGHS] If I can remember it all correctly. So, he tells it like this neighbor that they had, had come to the door. I don't really remember what the particular issue was, but they were starting some kind of argument. And my grandmother had answered the door. My uncle wasn't downstairs yet. But the neighbor had you know, put hands on my grandmother and my uncle saw that and they started to tussle. I don't know what that means.

Alex Chambers:  They being your grandmother--

Justin Carney:  My grandmother and the neighbor. Yeah. I don't know what the tussle means, but my uncle says when he saw that, he jumped in and they both started tussling with the neighbor. [LAUGHS]

Alex Chambers:  [LAUGHS]

Alex Chambers:  Tussler or not, her children loved being around her.

Unknown male:  Michelle Louise Carney was my mother.

Unknown female:  She was like--

Unknown male:  She was my mother. My father.

Unknown female:  --everything to me.

Unknown male:  My friend. Anything she asked me, "I'll get it done."

Alex Chambers:  Justin interviewed some of her kids about her. And he sent me the mix he made of their voices.

Unknown male:  She may have not had a lot of money. But she was great. She raised five kids.

Unknown female:  Because she raised five kids by herself.

Unknown male:  Ma was a strong woman.

Justin Carney:  My grandmother would go to the bar, and my mom would follow her. And while my grandmother was you know, drinking, my mom was drinking a Pepsi.

Alex Chambers:  Like at the bar with her?

Justin Carney:  At the bar with her, yes. And so you know, she would always follow her mom around.

Alex Chambers:  It wasn't even just her own kids.

Justin Carney:  So this is a little embarrassing story here. [LAUGHS] But I slept in the same bed as my grandmother, until high school. I did not want to be away from this woman. [LAUGHS] I feel like I was just like my mom, in that way because she describes not wanting to be away from her mother. Right? And so I guess I took after her. [LAUGHS] In that way.

Alex Chambers:  [LAUGHS]

Alex Chambers:  It kind of sounds like all your mom's siblings would have done that too?

Justin Carney:  Probably. I mean, you know, yeah. Maybe not sleep in the same bed, but you know, totally they just always wanted to be around her. Everybody wanted to be around her. Everybody. Everybody.

Alex Chambers:  But one thing grandparents remind us, is that our time on earth is limited. Justin was 18 when his grandmother passed away. When you're 18, you're starting to feel a sense of your affect on the world. You're making choices about your own life, and maybe you're starting to see beyond yourself, to how you affect the people around you. For Justin, it meant in this moment of intense emotion, he felt an almost magical power. It wasn't real, he knew that. But it created a shadow that followed him for years afterward.

Justin Carney:  She passed away in my mother's house. She was in the hospital for a little bit, and then she came back to my mom's house and it just wasn't the same. She was in the bed, almost all the time. Mostly sleeping, like rarely awake. There was this one night that I was in the room with her, and she asked me, I think she asked me do I think she's going to die? And you know, I'm just a kid you know? And she's expressing these fears and all of these things and I mean I told her no, but I didn't really believe what I was saying at the time. I didn't feel like I believed it. Because there she is, and what I can see as pain, pain, fear and all of these things. And I'm a kid and I'm just like-- is continuing to live good you know?

Justin Carney:  And so that, yeah, that moment was a struggle there, and that's something after she passed away that stuck with me.

Justin Carney:  I actually blamed myself for her death because I don't know exactly when the timeline exactly lines up, but when she asked me you know if she's going to die, and I said no, and she expressed those fears, I had written in my journal-- "May 21st, 2011" that I hoped she would you know? "Sometimes I think she should just die. So she wouldn't have to suffer anymore. Or maybe that's not exactly right. Maybe I think she should die so I don't have to see her suffer anymore." And I wasn't sure if that was for my own relief, or her relief at the time, and she passed away shortly after. And so I felt like my words had power you know? And I blame myself for that.

Alex Chambers:  Justin wasn't the only one who felt that day as a kind of a watershed.

Justin Carney:  Well the night that she passed away, so everybody was there. My mom, my aunt, my uncles, and-- my uncle Mark, he had left and--

Alex Chambers:  Yeah?

Justin Carney:  You know, to go home, take a shower.

Unknown female:  To see my hotel.

Justin Carney:  To get a little bit of rest.

Uncle Mark:  I had been there for a week already. And I left. It was on a Sunday [LAUGHS], so it was probably about seven, eight, nine o'clock. I dozed off, and me and my wife answer, came home, "Let's go home, let's get some rest."

Unknown female:  Well it was two o'clock.

Justin Carney:  I was actually watching a movie in my room, and my room was directly across from my grandmother's room. So I heard everything that was going on. And so when my mom came to knock on the door, I pretended to be asleep because I felt like if I opened the door, then it would be real. And she was knocking on the door, I was leaning up against the door preventing her from opening it, but you know I didn't want to cause more pain for you know, for my mom, for everybody else. And so I did open the door. My brother had fainted that night. My uncle Rod was very distraught, and so my mom took my uncle upstairs with her to console him. And my uncle Todd left the house and he had to go on a long walk and he didn't want to come back into the house.

Uncle Todd:  When she died, I had lost all hope for myself. Because as long as she was here, and I knew it, I could do better.

Justin Carney:  And my uncle Mark rushing back, driving furiously back, despite being too late. The way he says it is that he was just like, seconds too late. She had passed basically as soon as he parked. My aunt as well, you know, taking care of people because she's a nurse, and so you know, everybody's just going through their own pain in different ways. Some people apart, some people together. And so you know, that kind of-- my grandmother's still alive, everybody's in the same room and my grandmother passes away, disperse immediately. And so there's that fracture that happens immediately.

Justin Carney:  And so, after she passed, for about, I would say for about like five, six years, it was a real struggle to get people to come to the house. To come together, especially all at once.

Alex Chambers:  Something about the individual ways they were grieving made it hard to see each other as much as they used to. Hard to talk with each other, which made it a loss upon a loss. They didn't just lose their mother, they lost each other too. Justin spent years feeling bad about it. He'd lost his grandmother, and then also that closeness in his extended family. And on some level he felt like he'd caused it all, like he'd cast a spell with the things he'd written in his journal. This is what he was carrying with him as he studied art in college. Except that like most of us, he didn't even really know what he was carrying. All he knew was he had signed up for a large format photography class.

Alex Chambers:  Is it like the kind of camera that you have a cloth and you kind of put your head under it? [LAUGHS]

Justin Carney:  Yeah. That's exactly it. Yeah.

Alex Chambers:  Hold up a flash that goes pft! [LAUGHS]

Justin Carney:  [LAUGHS] Yeah. Well I didn't have any flash. I like natural light.

Alex Chambers:  Okay cool.

Justin Carney:  But that's what you see in the movies.

Alex Chambers:  Right.

Justin Carney:  Yeah. [LAUGHS]

Alex Chambers:  [LAUGHS]

Justin Carney:  That's the exact same camera.

Alex Chambers:  And all he wanted to do was take photos of his mom and her siblings. When we come back, Justin's going to find something to do with those photos, and with his grief and guilt.

Alex Chambers:  They say when the student is ready the teacher will come or at least the right course number. In Justin's case it was a class on artistic installations. He had to take a collection of his individual pieces of art and turn them into something people could interact with as a whole. It meant thinking about bigger ideas.

Justin Carney:  What I ended up doing was facing that guilt, bringing that in, because I felt like that was the best opportunity to really face that guilt and to kind of have help from the audience of getting over that guilt.

Alex Chambers:  How is the audience helping?

Justin Carney:  Yea. [LAUGHS] So, the project--

Alex Chambers:  It was all about how the project was displayed. He had two walls, the corner of a room. He took a bunch of family photos of his grandmother, mostly toward the end of her life, and blew them up to 24 by 30. He put those on the walls along with enlarged images of his journal at the time. The journal entries mostly say what was happening. Not a lot of emotion. But then on the ground there's more paper, more enlarged journal entries. These are torn and crumpled up and these are the pages from his journal that he feels bad about where he made wishes that came true and all the negative emotions he felt afterward, blaming himself, calling himself names.

Justin Carney:  And so, the way that I brought the audience into it is because these journal entries are on the floor and you have journal entries on the wall that are meant to be read, the audience has to step on the journal entries on the floor, these negative emotions. Which by having them step on it, signals to me that those particular emotions aren't real. They're not true. They don't have to hold as much weight.

Alex Chambers:  Do you remember how it felt to you when people were first interacting with it and walking on those?

Justin Carney:  It was scary. [LAUGHS] It was definitely scary. Even more scary when my uncle and my mom were interacting with it because I hadn't told anybody my feelings of how I felt guilty or what I even said to my grandmother, that conversation with my grandmother I didn't tell anybody about it.

Alex Chambers:  But that conversation was also in the piece?

Justin Carney:  Yea. And so, yea, it was really scary but I hide my fear really well. [LAUGHS] But I had a lot of people walk up to me, and this has happened with a lot of my exhibitions, people walk up to and they tell me their stories, and their feelings and how they connect to it. Strangers telling me about how their mom had passed and how it's so hard for them to deal with those feelings and that somehow my work helps.

Alex Chambers:  Justin's photography wasn't just changing things for his audiences.

Justin Carney:  In taking pictures of people, before it even became interviews or things like that, just taking pictures of people, things started changing again. Everybody more so separate but taking these photos, talking with people, being around my family members, they started opening up more.

Alex Chambers:  With you or with each other?

Justin Carney:  With me. I would say that things started getting back to people gathering all at once after I started doing interviews because one of my questions was how do you feel the relationships changed with everybody? And so, that really made them start thinking about that. Maybe it started that? [LAUGHS]

Alex Chambers:  Pat yourself on the back a little. [LAUGHS]

Justin Carney:  But I asked them questions about their mom, I asked them questions about their joys, their regrets, their relationships with each other.

Alex Chambers:  Did taking photos create another kind of intimacy with your family members?

Justin Carney:  Oh yea, for sure because with the photographs, what I would do is we'd schedule a time, I'd go over to their house and we'd go through their house together trying to find a good spot to take the photo. Because it's such a slow process, I would have conversations with them and this time it wasn't about my Grandma but just conversations with them about their lives and everything. Before I started taking pictures of my family members, I would say that our relationship may have been a little more on the surface. It was more, okay we have this connection, we're family.

Alex Chambers:  We're supposed to love each other.

Justin Carney:  Yea, and of course, it's real love but [LAUGHS] after the photos, learning about them as people beyond just being my aunt and my uncles and my mom, I could love them as people.

Alex Chambers:  They were family and being family they kind of like weren't people in a way, partly because by then you were also an adult and so then you're suddenly relating to each other as two people.

Justin Carney:  Yea, exactly. That's exactly it. And so, through making the photos, I think the connection started to reform differently because my Grandmother's not there but reform.

Justin Carney:  I had a conversation with one of my friends just last night actually, and we were talking about autobiographies, how people write stories about themselves and she was talking about how she feels that people that do that are very narcissistic. [LAUGHS] I was having a conversation and I was telling her my thoughts because I make work that's very personally. [LAUGHS]

Alex Chambers:  Yea, exactly, I was thinking that very thing.

Justin Carney:  Yea, and for sure, there's totally people who are narcissistic who exist out there and do that but I like to think that most of the people who do share personal things in an art way [LAUGHS], what they're trying to do is connect. They felt something for their lives that helped them in some way and they feel that maybe it'll help somebody else and it's the same when I make work. I mean, often the work that I make is me going through things. I'm in the moment going through things and making the work. [LAUGHS] But I share it because maybe it'll help other people also share.

 Because people's stories are important and that's what helps us connect with each other, is hearing other people's stories. Helps us connect with ourselves.

Alex Chambers:  It's not just the people's stories that are important but the actual sharing of the story is important.

Justin Carney:  Yea. Sharing the stories, sharing the feelings. Especially regarding death because living in America or at least in the America that I've experienced, people have experienced different kinds of things, but talking with other people too I would say that a majority of people don't really share their grief. And so, going back to trauma, grief can become traumatic when it's just internalized and it's not shared. Yea.

Alex Chambers:  Has it helped?

Justin Carney:  [LAUGHS] I would actually say yes. So, when I first started making work, I mean, my work has been birthed from fear. Fear that, oh no, my family's going to die, I don't have a lot of time, I have to do something, I have to make these things and through making the work and through interacting with my family, I can appreciate life more. I would say that in talking about death, I have a greater appreciation for life and that's kind of what I want for everybody. [LAUGHS] That's the goal, is having a deeper appreciation to what you do have, what is still here and honestly, making work about death it's got me thinking differently about death.

 Yes, the person is no longer here physically but they're still with me and they're with me in different ways, so spiritually, but as well as being raised by my mom has made my mom a part of me. I am a bit of my mother, I am a bit of my uncles, I am a bit of my aunt. And so, they're there by me just being alive. I am an amalgamation [LAUGHS] of them. And so, yea, no one's ever actually really gone. My Uncle Rod, he calls every month. That wasn't the case before. That's a more recent thing. He didn't always do that. He calls every month to check in.

Alex Chambers:  Calls you?

Justin Carney:  Yea, he calls everybody and he's calling to really keep that connection, to let everybody know that he's still here, he loves us and he's thinking about us and he cares and I'm not too annoyed. It's just usually when he calls I'm doing something. [LAUGHS] And so, I normally can't answer right away, I'm in class or something. But I am really appreciative of it and it's something that I want to implement within my own life, is letting people know that I care, just expressing that openly. Even if it's just a simple text, sending just "I love you" to my Mom and my brother sometimes.

Alex Chambers:  Maybe not calling them.

Justin Carney:  Yea. [LAUGHS] Phone calls aren't too much my thing. [LAUGHS]

Alex Chambers:  That's it for the show. We'd love to hear what this made you think about. Whether it was about your relationship to your family, experiences with loss or creative work or something else. You can record a voice memo on your phone and send it to us at wfiu.org/innerstates. You can also send an email. We might even talk about it on a future episode. Okay, we've got your quick moment of slow radio coming up, but first, if you liked the show, leave us a review on your favorite podcast app. We'd love to hear what you were doing while you listened, maybe you've been feeling like you need a career change and you want to influence the next generation, get fifth graders thinking about climate change maybe. So, you came up with this plan and you went into your garage and turned on Inner States to listen to while you built a DIY hot air balloon out of recycled grocery bags that you were going to take the students up into the atmosphere in to show them the awesomeness of cumulonimbus clouds up close. But when you started calling around to offer your educational trips into the sky...

Justin Carney:  The schools were like, you can't do that!

Alex Chambers:  But luckily you've been listening to Justin Carney talk about photography and you realized you can just take pictures of the clouds and that's why you decided to give Inner States five stars. Like that. Tell us what it's like. Inner States is made by me, Alex Chambers, our Associate Producer is Dom Heyob. Our social media master is Jillian Blackburn. Our intern is Karl Templeton. We get additional support from Eoban Binder, Natalie Ingalls, Sam Schemenauer, Payton Whaley, Kayte Young and Lisa Robbin Young. Our Executive Producer is Eric Bolstridge. Our theme song is by Amy Oelsner and Justin Vollmar. We have additional music by Amy Oelsner and Justin Vollmar and the artists at Universal Production Music. Okay, time for some found sound.

Alex Chambers:  That was chanting at the Zojo-ji Temple in Tokyo recorded by Karl Pearson. Thanks Karl. Until next time, I'm Alex Chambers, thanks as always for listening.