Millee Tibbs holds an MFA in photography from RISD and a BA in studio art and Hispanic studies from Vassar College. Tibbs has exhibited domestically and internationally at places such as Blue Sky Gallery, Portland Center for Art Photography, Oregon; Notre Dame University, Indiana; Mary Ryan Gallery and Winkeman/Plus Ultra Gallery, both in NY; and at both the Museum of Modern Art and Spanish Cultural Center in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. Her work is currently held by the Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR; the Pierogi 2000, Brooklyn flat file and is a part of the online database at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum. She has won numerous awards and grants including: Studio Residencies at The MacDowell Colony and the Wassaic Project in 2011, and the Santa Fe Art Institute in 2010; the Pawtucket Foundation Prize 2008; and the Award of Excellence from RISD in 2007. Tibbs is currently an Assistant Professor of Photography at Wayne State University in Detroit, MI.

Artist Statement

I am interested in surfaces and their relationship to what lies beneath – the discrepancy between what we see and what we know. I am drawn to photography because of its ubiquitous presence in our culture and its duplicitous existence as both an indexical representation of reality and a subjective construction of it. It is a slippery medium that easily shifts from scientific documentation of a moment in time to a subjective construction of reality. I am interested in the space where these qualities contradict each other and coexist simultaneously.

The series Proof is an exploration of the fetishistic quality of snapshot images. The images are the archive that my former husband and I submitted to the USCIS as “proof of marital union” when we applied for his green card. They function simultaneously as the legal evidence of our relationship and as our quotidian history. They are at once specific and sentimental while also being familiar and ordinary. When we separated I cut out our figures. The excision of the couple in the images opens them to a broader narrative of photographable moments and the emotional cache that is invested in them while pointing to the repetitive structures and codes of snapshot images.

In my series Do you look like me? I begin by creating an archive of visual doppelgangers. I solicit the cooperation of people (male and female, young and old), who think they look like me and employ the conventions of official identification photography, using standardized positions, proportions, and lighting as instrumental parameters. I shoot each subject with a passport Polaroid camera then pair their image with mine.