Ellen Carey

Ellen Carey’s Dings & Shadows are color photograms created by the artist entirely in the darkroom without either traditional subject matter or a negative stage in between. The artist crushes and manipulates her photographic paper by hand before exposing it to the filtered lights of the photographic process, producing remarkable abstract images in intense and highly saturated colors. Her work is freewheeling and experimental—untethered by rules, formal structures, or conventional procedures—and at the same time, anchored to the origins of photography, with its literal meaning “drawing with light”. Carey’s work represents a deft interplay between the random and controlled elements of her process, allowing the photo-object to speak: in color, in form, in composition.

Courtesy of the artist and JHB Gallery, New York

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Ellen Carey, a Pictures Generation contemporary and member of Buffalo’s avant-garde - Cindy Sherman and Robert Longo - upends the medium's collective histories in lens-based art, photography and technology with abstract, minimal “picture” signs. Photography Degree Zero (1996-2023) in Polaroid 20 X 24 and Struck by Light (1988-2023) in Photogram are the names of her dual artistic practices; her third in: research, scholarship, writing - Pictus & Writ - essays include - Man Ray, Sol LeWitt, Anna Atkins, plus essays on her own work.

The Royal Photographic Society (RPS) named Carey 1 of the top 100 women photographers worldwide (2018) under their Hundred Heroines platforms, 1 of 14 Americans (www.hundredheroines.org).

Light Struck at Fox Talbot Museum, Lacock (England) and Struck by Light at Connecticut’s New Britain Museum of American Art (www.nbmaa.org) see the arc pf her pioneering and experimental photos-objects in these two solo exhibitions, plus a group exhibition at the BnF in Paris and the Paris PHOTO art fair.

Ellen Carey is an educator, independent scholar, guest curator, photographer and lens-based artist. Her unique experimental work (1974-2023) spans several decades highlighted in 70 one-person exhibitions, several hundred group ones (1974-2023), publishing essays under Pictus & Writ (2008-2023) in tandem with multiple books, exhibition catalogues, lectures and interviews, plus reviews and grants.

She emphasizes drawing with light, photography’s indexical; light with color, underscored in process and approach, is her performative record: a visual all - or - nothing (zero). Her photographs no longer represent object-subject relations but rather the twin interplay of light and shadow, stark in black and white minimalism while freeing color itself into a kaleidoscope of abstraction. Well developed in the 20th century — Abstract Expressionism, Minimal, Conceptual Art — Carey’s photographic pictures of nothing upend the medium's collective histories asking us now: “What is photography?” Or “Is it a photograph”?

Ellen Carey is an Associate Professor of Photography at Hartford Art School - University of Hartford. She lives, teaches and works in Connecticut, after many years in New York, where she was born (1952). Her BFA is from Kansas City Art Institute (KCAI), her MFA from SUNY@Buffalo, now UB, briefly studying at The Art Students League in NYC.

New Books & Publications: Stephen Frailey - Looking at Photography and Andy Grundberg How Photography Became Contemporary Art; Ken Miller Pictures.