Raine Roberts | Imprints
Raine Roberts ©
Written by Alexander Loukopoulos
Kiss me now or kiss me never - Raine Roberts on photo-sculpturalism and the transitional qualities of East Williamsburg.
New York City has always been akin to a revolving door. Hundreds of thousands have cycled through its streets over the years. Every minute, it seems, is both the end of one story and the beginning of another. Its existence is built upon the expectation that those who leave contribute as much as those who stay. In this sense, New York City is inevitably defined by absence as much as it is by presence - and nowhere is this notion more apparent than in Brooklyn, a borough no stranger to out-of-towners and a centuries-long history to show for it.
Raine Roberts, a Brooklyn resident and recent ICP graduate, experiences this transitional quality firsthand within her stomping ground of East Williamsburg. Initiated by her residency at FREE FILM: NYC, Roberts sought to document her neighborhood through the camera lens. What started as a study on structure and the people that occupied these structures became Imprints - a project which ironically found inspiration in the by-product of structure; the objects left behind in the name of community and progress.
Raine Roberts ©
But what exactly does “community” and “progress” mean to a neighborhood whose residents are known for their impermanence? It is still too early to know. But what can be procured at this time is Imprints role as the prologue to a much larger, more socially pertinent saga. One whose impact will extend beyond Brooklyn, and certainly beyond New York City. Though Roberts captures only a microcosm of her own personal urban environment, what she does capture is integral to the human experience: trash.
A person’s trash can say a lot about them. The same can be said for an entire community. Roberts, whose work is focused on the delicate fluctuations between structure and chaos, knows that one cannot exist without the other. Similar to how a brand-new high-rise cannot exist without the trash piles heaped on its curb. Each half tells its own story about the whole. Imprints happens to be predicated on the idea that trash, or the stuff that people get rid of, is telling a more interesting tale.
Raine Roberts ©
Hence the weight that absence holds in the process of defining a space. The absence of a mattress from an apartment suggests a space deprived of comfort and safety, or even worse, an entire building or floor emptied of its residents - a frightening development for a project that initially attempted to document the community as a place of structure; a place where things are being built up and strengthened in order to reach a common goal. Imprints does in fact document the community, but provides an updated, more harrowing definition for one. As it turns out, a community can also be a group of people who stay in their own lane, who build things that last only for the moment and end relationships as fast as they start them. In other words, a group of people who are quick to leave things behind.
But then again, Imprints is still only a beginning. Though it may sound discouraging, its subject matter and their implications still leave room for interpretation. In developing these photos, Roberts realized that the possessions people left behind can take on a new meaning in the same way the understanding of communities can: “Working primarily in the darkroom with the images gathered, I learned that once objects are photographed they hold a different shape and another purpose entirely. Almost sculptural. Further propelling their classification of ‘transitional’ to a new meaning”.
Raine Roberts ©
The subjects do take on an identity and texture of their own. By focusing on them in isolation, a new context is forced upon them, either through their own objective existence or through people’s subjective desire to make meaning of everything. Either way, objects that other people have deemed unnecessary gain a new relevance. While not being of practical use, each subject becomes a cog in the machine of redefinition, a machine which is of vital importance to urban dwellers. By being photographed, these objects begin to stand for something else.
What they end up standing for may not be ideal. But the fact that possessions can be caught in a state of flux in terms of their use within society is a comforting thought. Not everything ends up being total waste. With Imprints, Roberts underpins the fraught relationships people have with their possessions, and what those relationships say about their community. After all, society has inextricably linked us with what we own. But in that same vein, if people can give objects new meaning, then people can give new meaning to those around them. Such an attitude can go great lengths in restoring and restructuring ideas of what a real urban community could be.
Raine Roberts ©
