Rangefinder Magazine
May 2005

Click Here for printable version of this article.

Profile: Tealia Ellis Ritter by Larry Singer
Psychological Photographer

“To find out what one is fitted to do, and to secure an opportunity to do it,” said American educational maven John Dewey, “is the key to happiness.” Twenty-six-year-old Tealia Ellis Ritter took those words very seriously by adopting Dewey as her muse and artistic inspiration. As a photographer, she has proven Dewey knew what he was talking about. Not only did Tealia discover in the nick of time what she is best fitted to do, she secured the opportunity to do it, and by her own admission, couldn’t be happier.

A CHANGE OF PLANS
Growing up in the Quad Cities section of eastern Iowa, Tealia began taking pictures at age eight when her father bought her a single lens reflex camera.

After leaving high school, those photo skills were destined to lay dormant as Tealia spent nearly three years pursuing an undergraduate degree in psychology at the University of Iowa from 1996 to 1998.
“I was one class away from graduating with my degree,” she says, “when I decided that being a psychologist was not what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.”

What turned her around was an internship at a facility for people afflicted with schizophrenia.

“They were nice people,” she says, “and I was and still am, fascinated with the mind and how it works, but one day I realized I was just not going to be happy being a psychologist. It was too safe. I did not want to be one of those people who spend most of their lives doing something they really don’t want to do and then discover when it’s too late they can’t go back and do it all over again.

“When I began studying psychology,” she continues, “I thought I would go the accepted route of getting my undergraduate degree, then my graduate degree, and eventually settling into a nice, safe career as a psychologist.”

But as she neared graduation, her artistic spirit awoke from hibernation, and she was soon enrolled in the photographic fine arts program at Columbia College Chicago.

FINDING HER NICHE
While at Columbia, between the spring of 1999 and June 2001, Tealia found her creative niche and started to garner a reputation as a first class fine art photographer.

In 1999 she began her career in fine art photography by winning an Academic Excellence in Photography scholarship.

In 2000 she was nominated for the Kodak Award, and won a First Place award and a scholarship to Columbia at the Annual Hokin Honors Exhibition. During that year she also won a Certificate of Recognition for outstanding academic achievement. In 2003–04 Tealia was awarded the Virgil M. Beall Fellowship.

PSYCHOLOGICAL AMBIGUITY
Tealia admits her psychology studies have played a role in inspiring some of her images, especially those she shot using Polaroid type 55 film, which yields a positive and negative image.

“While studying psychology,” she says, “I learned that memory sometimes leads people to believe events happened in a certain way, when they really didn’t occur that way.”

That psychological ambiguity, Tealia theorizes, is what gives her early work, especially those that appeared in Issue 26 of Polaroid International Photography magazine, an ephemeral, mysterious aura.

“I am most attracted to works of art,” she says, “that can be interpreted many ways and change each time you look at them. I enjoy it when people tell me the different things they see and the feelings they get from my photographs.”

DRAWING ON HER IMAGES
“Each still life,” she says, “was drawn as a sketch first, often referencing a particular experience or emotion. I then found objects to satisfy the needs of the image. The culmination of this process is the photographing of the constructed tableau in my studio.

For her images in Polaroid’s magazine, Tealia used PolaPan P/N film to create her final picture, but before scanning or printing her images, she first altered the negative, using colored inks to paint sections of the negative with the opposite color on the color wheel of the color she desired on her final print. This combination of colored inks on a black-and-white negative produces an eerie blend of perfection and imperfection, reality and fantasy.

Most recently, samples of Tealia’s work have appeared in the March/April edition of View Camera magazine.

LIVE AND ETHEREAL
The pictures that appeared in the Polaroid magazine were part of a larger body of work Tealia calls “The Live Creature and Ethereal Things,” a title Tealia derived from her inspiration and muse, John Dewey.

“Dewey describes in his text ‘art as experience,’ ” Tealia says, “the being who is fully alive as an entity moving through life sensing the rhythm of pure existence, able to recognize the art of the ordinary.”

It is the artist’s job, Tealia continues, to transform the rough material of life into cohesive pieces representative of their own experiences and observations.

The title, “The Live Creature and Ethereal Things,” comes from the 11th chapter of Dewey’s text, and references the concept that art, like life, should be about the sensory experience of the commonplace feelings and events that bombard each of us every day of our lives.

One of Tealia’s goals is to leave behind the traditional notion that photography is meant to record the reality of the tangible world. Instead she would like her images to represent “the reality of the mind through stimulating the sensory perceptions of touch, smell, taste, sight and memory.

“After my father was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor, I began sifting through the set of experiences that made up my own life by specifically examining the string of memories that connected me to my father from childhood through adulthood. These occurrences were then whittled down to pure sensations and iconic moments.” These moments included such memories as a day at the beach, her first heartbreak and her early intuitive knowledge of the cycle of life.

TRASH AS ART
Her next series of photographs, she says, will have to do with the photographing in her studio elements that make up the urban construction sites of strip malls, condominiums and home renovations.

“I was walking my dog when I found a piece of wood from a construction site, and I was fascinated by its shape and texture, so I took it back to my studio and photographed it from different angles.

“We live in a culture where strip malls and pre-planned housing divisions are becoming the norm and there is an ample supply of discarded construction waste. Due to the personal confrontation with the trash left behind by the construction of identical dwellings within my own neighborhood, I decided to begin a project of cleaning up and examining what others had discarded.” Each item will be photographed in her studio and denied its original setting.

She hopes this almost anthropological approach will reveal issues concerning decay and current societal definitions of importance.

THE AFTERMATH THEORY
When asked if she had any particular photographic philosophy that she carries with her as a guide for her work, Tealia stated her belief in the Aftermath Theory.

“The Aftermath Theory is the opposite of the Decisive Moment theory.” The Decisive Moment theory (developed by one of history’s most renowned photographers, Henri Cartier-Bresson (b. 1908), purports (as he wrote in a 1952 book, The Decisive Moment) that each episode in life contains a specific moment when each element falls into alignment. The resultant geometric pattern reveals all that can be revealed about the episode.

“The Aftermath Theory states,” Tealia continued, “that after the Decisive Moment comes the aftermath, that moment when the true nature of the event is revealed. That is what I’m trying to capture in my photography.”

After graduating from, and teaching at, Columbia in May 2004 with her Masters in Arts from the School of Art and Art History, Fine Art Photography, Tealia moved to St. Louis, Missouri, to continue her fledgling career at a fine arts photographer.

“My only plans for the future are to continue doing what I have been doing as a student and be a successful professional fine art photographer,” she says.

Tealia Ellis does not currently have a web site, but can be reached at tealiaellis@ hotmail.com/.

Larry Singer is a writer and photographer now living in Lauderhill, Florida. He has taught photography in Florida and Denver and now has an obsession with hearts. He can be contacted at larrysinger@mac.com.