Solo Show: Millee Tibbs

A Conversation with Millee Tibbs by Grant Willing

How did you begin this process of photographing yourself based on images from your childhood?

I have always been fascinated by my childhood photos. I was an only child and my early life was very well documented. I knew that I wanted to work with them, but at first I wasn’t sure how. I was drawn to the poses I made as a child and interested in finding out how the connotations of these would change with the body that performs them. I had also finished another project dealing with self-portraiture (the series Self-portraits) and was really interested in the power dynamic between photographer and subject. I liked the idea of getting to juxtapose the image of me as subject with an image of me as author.

When looking for childhood photographs to re-photograph, what do you look for in the older photograph? What draws you to these specific images and this specific childhood time period?

When I first chose the images I instinctively went with ones where it seemed like I was very aware of the camera and also seemed to be performing for it. The more time I spent with these images, the more I realized the flirtatious relationship that I had with the camera as a young child.

In many of the newer images, there are subtle differences that point to a specific contemporary time period. Can you talk more about the juxtaposition of reinserting yourself into past environments while still attaining a contemporary look?

I’m not sure what you mean by “contemporary look”… In reenacting the images I never tried to hide the process. My favorite moments are when my adult body simply can’t possibly fit in the space of the older photograph logically, or where there is an element that is repeated that couldn’t exist in the newer image. The image with the dog (Oct. 1981 E, 2007) is one of those examples. People always ask me if my family still has the same dog… Part of what makes this project successful, in my opinion, is its impossibility. Even if we wanted to, we can never go back to childhood. I wanted the images to point to this.

Is there a reason why you inserted the newer images of yourself into the older environments instead of replicating the older environments as well?

I considered re-creating the environments, but because I wanted the focus of this project to be the repetition of the body and pose I thought that it made more sense to have those as the only thing that change from one image to another. When you place two images side by side the viewers reaction is to compare them. I wanted the viewer to focus on the changes in the body (and its psychology) and not get distracted by the differences in the background which would have inevitably occurred if I had tried to recreate them.

Do you feel like the images you created in response to the childhood images are a type of performance? Are you performing specifically for the creation of an image or is it more an attempt to revive past memories?

Yes, I definitely think that the recreations are a type of performance, but I think that the original snapshots are also a performance. I guess, in a way, I am trying to relive what it was like to be photographed, to re-experience a physical memory of what if felt like to hold a specific pose and what I might have been thinking in the that moment, but I am not as interested in trying to relive the past or revive memories in a nostalgic way. I also like to think that I am complicit in the making of this project as a child – that perhaps as an adult I am recreating performances that were intended to be recreated.