Create For The Joy Of Creating
The topic of the family has shaped and guided Tealia Ellis Ritter’s work throughout her career. The Model Family is an ongoing research project in which Tealia photographs generations of her family members growing up, changing, becoming. As the project develops, its shape changes: currently divided into three parts and telling a story of the family in an authentic yet cinematic manner. Going deeper, we think about the meaning of the memory, the links and connections it creates in one’s mind and reality. Series as Things We Burned and Flowers For Oscar, while standing apart in time, connect to the same moments in the past with a different understanding at the time being.
Tealia Ellis Ritter is a photographer who lives and works in rural Connecticut. She has her work exhibited by Aperture, The Magenta Foundation, Taschen NYC, and others. Tealia works mostly with black and white images shooting on Mamiya RZ67 and Mamiya 7 II. She has an MFA from the University of Iowa and has taught at The University of Missouri and The University of Iowa.
In this interview, we dive to discuss some personal topics which have profoundly influenced Tealia’s creative work. Tealia shares some of her memories about her father, who had passed away, and the pressing need to find an input in photography to deal with the family trauma by recreating the act of spreading the ashes or capturing the moment of burning the personal belongings several years later. We speak about the pandemic, working in the darkroom, and raising kids in this period as Tealia explains, the experience leads to “thinking a lot about protection and what that actually means, the limitations of my own ability to protect my children.”
‘For me, there are times when the emotion is so great, so overwhelming that I feel the making of the work must become more physical, and in this particular circumstance, photograms helped to fill that need.’
I Am
How do you think your connection to creation, to photography, to the processes in the darkroom, the print has changed in response to the year of the pandemic, the lockdowns, the redefined physical boundaries? In what way it affected raising your two kids?
Wow, great question! I’m not going to lie, it has been difficult to feel productive during the lockdown/pandemic. I have learned over time that the only way for me to get work done, while raising children, is to be very scheduled/disciplined. I had a routine, pre-Covid, of doing a lot of shooting during the warm months of the year of my kids/family, and then during the colder months, when they’re at school, I tend to spend most of my time in the darkroom printing. Having the kids at home, all of the time, totally destroyed that rhythm and the stress of what was going on paralyzed me mentally for a bit.
But as a mother one learns that adaptation is key to survival, so as the months continued, I began to recognize that I was capable of channeling the visceral emotions I was having into new works. I began thinking a lot about protection and what that actually means, the limitations of my own ability to protect my children, and the negative aspects of protection as well as the positives. I also focused on loss and joy in new ways. In order to handle the kids being at home all the time, I brought them into the darkroom more. I made a lot of photograms with them and experimented with alternative methods of combining imagery.
For me, there are times when the emotion is so great, so overwhelming that I feel the making of the work must become more physical, and in this particular circumstance, photograms helped to fill that need. I hope that when my children look back on this time, they will have a sense that we got to know each other in a more complete way. They never really got to see me work on a day-to-day basis before in the darkroom and now they have. I also think they have developed a new sense of pride that we are collaborating on something together that is special, at least to us, and I value their contributions immensely.
‘Stylistically I am really trying to unlearn much of what I was taught during school. I want to go back to the mindset I had when I was a kid: just making photographs, not thinking too much about how they would look or what they were about.’
MFA
You received your MFA from The University of Iowa, later on engaging in teaching at the University of Iowa and Missouri. MFA is regarded as a prestigious degree that allows an artist to look at the creation from the perspective of an outsider asking relevant questions and employing deeper layers of interpretation. How would you juxtapose the main learnings from the experience of studying and the experience of teaching?
The years working on my MFA were very challenging for me, not from an academic perspective, but from a personal perspective. I chose to attend the University of Iowa because that was where my father was doing his treatment for a malignant brain tumor, and we had been told that he did not have long to live, so I wanted to be close to him and to my family during what was a very difficult time. I would meet him after chemo or radiation, and he would nap at my apartment, or we would drive to the river and talk. I’m very happy to have had that time with him. He passed away right after I graduated. I had photographed my family for quite a while by the time I started my MFA, but it was too painful to photograph them while my dad was sick, so I stopped during my MFA and made still life work and portraits of strangers.
I also studied printmaking quite a bit which was great because I love materiality, and it really helped me to view the photographic image in terms of layers of information. As far as teaching, I love teaching! I love seeing people’s work and talking about art, and being a part of a creative community. Sometimes, I think about going back to teaching, but between doing my own work and having two small children, I’m not really sure there is time at the moment. Hopefully, I’ll make it back into the classroom someday.
How did it develop the way you work and your creation processes?
Funny you’re asking about how teaching/working on an MFA influenced my creative process…. I actually thought about this recently. I feel very fortunate to have an understanding of the history of art and knowledge of the technical elements of photography because this operates as a kind of backbone to the creation of work. However, stylistically I am really trying to unlearn much of what I was taught during school. I want to go back to the mindset I had when I was a kid: just making photographs, not thinking too much about how they would look or what they were about. I want to free my mind from the concept of a 'good photograph,' and create for the joy of creating.
‘Memory is much more like time travel and new links are being made all the time. In the end, the work, like memory, is a feeling I am left with more than a series of events.’
The Model Family
The ongoing series The Model Family is a documentation of your family members: their lives and personal changes that occur as time passes. The series is shot in a B&W and merges the real, the personal, and the aesthetics of the way the creator perceives the characters. It is also divided into parts, how would you define each part, where does one begin and end? What is the most surprising thing you discovered/uncovered looking back at the family members?
To begin at the end of your question, the most surprising thing I discovered from looking back at the images of my family members is that we really did create something special together, and whether that has meaning to anyone outside of our little group, no longer matters as much to me, because the images as a group have meaning to me. Although obviously, I’m thrilled when people respond to the images, but I’m not making the images for anyone else at this point, if that makes sense. I feel so indebted to my family for being willing to go along on this journey with me and make these images together that are vulnerable and specific to our life. We have had such a crazy trip, and we love each other.
The Model Family is divided into parts as an organizational strategy because there are so many images, but it really is one body of work. The images are meant to be shuffled into new chapters as time passes and lives change; new relationships will be drawn to past works. I thought for some time about arranging the works chronologically so that the viewer sees very clearly the march of time, and I may do this at some point, but for now, I feel it is more powerful to create associations between individuals and moments across time.
There are images of my daughter that look like my sister as a child, and images where my sister begins to look like my mom. I like seeing that relationship. Memory also doesn’t really work in a linear fashion. For example, I remember fishing with my father, and then I think of fishing with my son, and then my mind bounces to a vacation spent on the beach… At least for me, memory is much more like time travel and new links are being made all the time. In the end, the work, like memory, is a feeling I am left with more than a series of events.
‘At the heart of it all though, we are both motivated by the same driving force, deep love of a small group of people, and a desire to create and archive so we can hold on.’
Oscar W. Ellis
Your father enjoyed photography and was also deeply engaged in making family portraits. What would be a connecting element, you might acknowledge now, in the way you and your father portrayed the family members? Do their traits and characteristics look similar or different in the images?
This is a profoundly emotional question for me to answer. I think of my dad all the time when I’m in my studio working or photographing my family. We photograph in very different ways… I tend to be more deliberate, whereas his work maybe feels more spontaneous, but there are definitely some images with overlapping energy. His work was all in color, transparencies primarily, and all 35 mm. Obviously, I work mostly in black and white and use larger format film.
At the heart of it all though, we are both motivated by the same driving force, deep love of a small group of people, and a desire to create and archive so we can hold on. My father wrote me a letter before he passed away, and in it, he said something along the lines of… ”look at the photographs I made of you all, and you will know how I feel.” I know it is simplistic and not very academic to speak of photography in these terms, and I believe there are a lot of levels that I can discuss my work on, but behind all of that is love and curiosity and wonder about these people that surround me.
My father shared that sense of commitment and adventurous, inquisitive nature, and that spirit binds us together. I was also undoubtedly influenced by his style and approach. His work was the first photographic imagery I was routinely exposed to in the slide shows he used to put on for us. I hope someday to publish a book of his work or a book of our work together. I think it would be really powerful. After all, my relationship with my sister and mother is very different from his relationship with the same people, as a wife and a daughter, so you see different sides of each individual and of course, he never met my children, but he photographed his own children (myself and my sister), so there is that duality as well.
Emotions in Photography
Things We Burned and Flowers For Oscar are probably the two series with the profound emotions displayed to the fullest. While in Things We Burned we see a representation of a personal way to deal with family trauma culminating with the detailed list of things too painful to keep; in Flowers For Oscar the visual element changes to an artistic/symbolic presentation of emotions. How did the creative process change working on such a distinct project?
You are the first person to point out these two series in relation to one another. And really I had not even connected them in the way you just did, although they are truly two sides of one coin. Things We Burned and Flowers For Oscar, while visually very different, are both about processing my father, Oscar’s, death. Flowers For Oscar was created first and revolves around the spreading or throwing of my father’s ashes on the farm that we lived on prior to his death. I don’t know if you have ever spread someone’s ashes, but the box is so small that they fit in… I believe the typical weight of an adult’s ashes is about 6 pounds. A whole body becomes 6 pounds.
My father was the first person I lost in my life, and when I grabbed his body with my hand and saw it turn the ground white and then disappear, it really impacted me. Everything felt foreign like I was in a dream. The world was the same but altered. As a result of this feeling, I started photographing the ground and vegetation on the farm, where my father had been spread, but the images seemed too normal, and nothing felt normal to me. It was through a series of experiments with the 4x5 in color film I had shot of the ground that I arrived at throwing/spreading materials onto the already processed negatives to physically mimic the act of spreading ashes. This act creates intense color shifts, which allowed the images to be recognizable but also altered and unreal. The repetition of the act of throwing with images of the ground, which had symbolically become his body for me, felt true.
With Flowers For Oscar and really all my work, the creative process is driven by trying to find the material way to express a feeling. I photograph my family basically all the time, and those images are dealing with time and the physicality of the human body, so it makes sense to me to create portraits. Other times the feeling isn’t about time but is perhaps about an act or a gesture, so I like to experiment until my internal process seems to be in sync with my external process.
The images in Things We Burned vacillate from very 'normal' images of the family to images that express a trauma. These images were created when my mom, my sister, and myself gathered at the family farm (where the ashes were spread) to sort through my father’s belongings, as well as family belongings, in preparation for the sale of the house and property approximately 14 years after my father’s death. It was an emotional experience, to say the least, because it represented letting go of the life my father had built. The two weeks of sorting culminated in a fire where we burned a number of painful but meaningful objects as a symbolic gesture. I chose to photograph the event as it unfolded because it felt like a moment of significance in our lives.
Next Steps
What project are you working on or planning as the next one?
Maybe this is bad to admit, but I don’t really plan projects. I’m just working all the time, and I’ll go where the work takes me. I am obviously still photographing my family and hope to continue to do so until I can’t make images anymore. I guess that is the magic of the whole thing. I have no idea what is around the corner.
