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| "She
has taken her photography down a road where no
one else has gone," says Reuter who adds that
often three assistants are needed to help feed
the 10 feet long panels of paper back through
the rollers of the 20X24 Camera at the studio.
One image may be drawn through three or four times,
varying the time it takes to pull it though (from
which the title of her recent exhibition Pulls
is taken). "It's a painstaking process," he explains,
"that involves selections and decisions throughout
the several hours...there is always an exciting
element of the unexpected in Ellen's work." |
No. 78, 79, 80
Birthday Portraits,
1997 |
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No.
42,
1995
No
60 & 61,
1996
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While
the process is formal, the motivation behind
Carey's work often comes from the personal sphere.
Family Portrait and Birthday Portrait
are formally similar to her other abstract and
minimal work but the images in the two series
have distinct symbolic and narrative content.
Spurred by recent losses in her family, Carey
created Family Portrait as a memento
mori for her middle brother, her mother and
her father. For Carey these dark negatives are
the visual equivalent of absence and mourning.
Birthday Portrait combines the birth
color assigned to babies with the color of the
birthstone for each of Carey's deceased family
members, two of whom died the day before their
birthdays, as a celebration of life and a remembrance
of loss.
Looking
toward the future, Carey will continue to push
the limits of conventional photography with
her art, challenging our ideas of what a photograph
is, and transforming a technical process into
an unexpected and heightened form.
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| Ellen
Carey was born in New York City and lives in Hartford,
Connecticut. She is Associate Professor at the
Hartford Art School (University of Hartford).
Her work has been exhibited both in the United
States and internationally including retrospectives
presented at the Wadsworth Athenaeum, the National
Academy of Sciences and International Center of
Photography. Her photographs are included in many
permanent collections such as The Metropolitan
Museum of Art, The Art Institute of Chicago, The
Albright Knox Museum and The Los Angeles County
Museum of Art. She has been the recipient of grants
from the Polaroid Artists Support Program and
the National Endowment for the Arts. |
No.
47,
1995 |
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All
photographs are made with Polaroid 20x24 Polacolor
or Polapan Black-and-White film.
Copyright
remains with the author.
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