Ellen Carey

Item Description:

Ellen has donated a beautiful photogram, an individual and striking item with strong, stunning colours. The photogram has also been signed by the internationally renowned artist.

Dimensions:

50.5 x 40.5cm

Photograph:

Biography:

ELLEN CAREY Artist Statement

Questions frequently asked about my work include, ”How is this picture made?” followed by “What is this a picture of?” The first question addresses photography as process. The photographic object often involves an intersection of process and invention, as does the practice of photography itself. In traditional photography, both the process and the invention are “transparent”, mere means to an end. In my work the process becomes the subject. The second question addresses the conundrum of a photographic image without a picture or a “sign” to read. These two questions challenge our cultural and historically prescribed expectations for this medium to narrate and document, all the while revealing no trace of its own origins.

The title of my photographic practice “Photography Degree Zero” refers to Roland Barthes’ book, “Writing Degree Zero”(1953), which offers a critical discourse on the departure from a descriptive narrative in French avant-garde literature. In related fashion, my work represents a departure from the picture/sign idea in photography found in images such as landscapes, portraits or still life. Instead, my work consists of a photographic image made without a subject, or any reference to a place, a person or an object.

Under this umbrella concept of “Photography Degree Zero” from the last ten years of my artistic activity, there are two categories. First, artworks I make in a studio, with a camera, but without a darkroom. This work involves my use of the Polaroid 20 X 24 camera, housed in New York City, one of five in the world and close to thirty years old. Familiar with the inner intricacies of this camera, I have invented new photographic activities and coined terms with which to describe the making of these photographs, such as “Pulls” and “Rollbacks”. These terms have made their way into the language of photography, in much the same way as the 19 th century terms for photograms, daguerreotypes and tintypes. This camera produces a unique, large contact positive print, along with its negative, in a one-step peel-away process taking a mere 60-seconds to develop. In a series of changes, actions or functions I am able to make work that is both photographic and abstract/minimal at the same time, often exhibiting the negatives along with the positives, giving equal status to both.

Parallel to my Polaroid work is another category: photograms. These artworks are made in a darkroom, they are not studio-based and are camera-less. A photogram is a 19 th century technique, which is also a process/print and discovery/invention, like the 20 th century Polaroid. It was in 1834 that the British inventor, William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877), used the sun to expose an object (fern leaf/lace) that created a ghostly outlined negative image, later contact printed, to make a positive, first called “photogenic drawings”, later named “photogram”. Thus the negative/positive axis serves as the foundation for all photography, and has symbolic as well as physical reference to the negative/shadow/black and positive/light/white themes that also interest me. These photograms are less well known than my Polaroid work, and are rarely seen or published.

http://www.ellencarey.com/