Powell

Description

This collection of photographs comes from a larger project called "Betty Jane," which using AI-generated images as a means of reconstructing memories of my grandmother, exploring how this technnology can help navigate personal histories and fragmented memories. Betty Jane died at the age of 34 inside of a mental hospital. The documentation that remains of her life is roughly fifty surviving photographs and more than sixty-year-old memories from her niece, Ann, and her four children: Mike, Mary, Jim, and my father, Bob. Through the collection of their memories and stories of Betty Jane, I used AI to recreate the visuals of memories of her that explore the stigma of mental illnesses that can be passed down through generations.

Process

For most of my life, the only things I knew about my grandmother were that I was named after her and that she died inside of a mental hospital. As I approach the age of her death, and navigate life as a woman with a family history of mental illness, my curiosity of who she was and what happened to her has grown. With the help of artificial intelligence, this project was a way of me weaving together what remains of Betty Jane, as well as to futher explore my own personal history and begin healing generational trauma.

Tools

The photographs in this series are were made in Midjourney, using the roughly fifty photographs that I have of Betty Jane as a moodboard. I gathered memories through conversations with Betty Jane’s children and niece. Their stories, shared in fragments, recollections, and direct quotes, became the foundation for this project. As I listened, I began to form my own sense of Betty Jane, shaped as much by imagination as by memory. I translated their words sometimes verbatim, sometimes interpreted and summarized into prompts for Midjourney, allowing the AI to generate visuals of a life that has little documentation left.