Ellen Carey

Ellen Carey, Self-Portrait, Polaroid 20 x 24 color positive print, 24" x 20" (image)/34" x 22" (object), 1986. Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art collection. Ellen Carey is an American artist known for conceptual photography that explores non-traditional approaches involving process, exposure and paper. Her work has ranged from painted and multiple-exposure, Polaroid 20 x 24, Neo-Geo self-portraits beginning in the late 1970s to cameraless, abstract photograms and minimal Polaroid images from the 1990s onward, which critics compare to color-field painting. Los Angeles Times critic Leah Ollman describes her photography as "inventive, physically involving, process-oriented work" and her photograms as "performative sculptures enacted in the gestational space of the darkroom," whose pure hues, shadows and color shifts deliver "optical buzz and conceptual bang." International Center of Photography (ICP), Fox Talbot Museum (UK) and Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, and alternative spaces such as Hallwalls and Real Art Ways. Her work belongs to the museum collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Centre Pompidou, and Smithsonian American Art Museum, among others. In 2019, she was named one of the Royal Photographic Society (London) "Hundred Heroines" recognizing leading women photographers worldwide. In addition to her art career, Carey is an associate professor of photography at the Hartford Art School and a writer and researcher on the history of photography.

Life and career Carey was born in New York City. In 1979, after receiving a CAPS grant, she moved to New York City and rented a studio in Soho.

During her first decade in New York, Carey was featured in shows at PS1 ("The Altered Photograph", 1979), the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the Bronx Museum of Art, the São Paulo Biennale ("The Heroic Figure", traveling 1984-6), The Alternative Museum, and ICP, among others. the Amon Carter Museum (2018) and New Britain Museum (2023). and the surveys, "Controlling the Chaos" (Carnegie Museum of Art, 2020) and "Alter Egos|Projected Selves" (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2021).

Since 1991, Carey has divided time between living and working in Hartford, Connecticut and New York City.

Ellen Carey, Color Theory, Polaroid 20 x 24 color positive print, 24" x 20", 1995. Private Collection.

Work Critic and curator Lyle Rexer identifies Carey as among the "most committed experimental photographers" in the United States; her explorations span black-and-white self-portraits embellished with paint, psychedelic portraits and abstract works made with the Polaroid 20 x 24, and cameraless, abstract photograms. She has experimented with the medium's chemical, light-related, color and material properties, often rejecting its documentary dimension and hierarchical relations of subject and object in favor of possibilities residing between painting and sculpture, realized through the manipulation of process and printing. Her work references a wide-range of movements, including Op Art and Neo-Geo, Neo-Expressionism, Surrealism and Dada, Minimalism, Conceptual art, feminism and performance art. Carey's art can be organized into three major categories: early self-portraits and portraits; abstract photograms she collectively titles, "Struck by Light"; and abstract, Polaroid-based works she titles, "Photography Degree Zero."

Early self-portraits and portraits (1976–1988) In a review of Carey's 1987 survey at ICP, Art in America critic Stephen Westfall described her self-portraits and portraits as "vastly underrated" work that proposed a merging of human form with metaphysical energies, made visible on the photographs through painted marks, light pens, and superimposed psychedelic and geometric patterns. Her early works were black-and-white, gender-specific images whose dramatic poses and lighting and expressive marks suggested emotional states of pain, vulnerability or self-assurance and organic, ritualistic scenarios. This work departed from traditional portraiture in no longer seeking to capture the character or identity of its subjects; Photograms date back to the dawn of photography, in work by mid-19th-century artists Anna Atkins and William Henry Fox Talbot—and later, Man Ray—who placed botanical specimens, salt, silver or other objects onto light-sensitive paper to create "shadow" images. She began with black-and–white photograms, before shifting to muted color images that New York Times reviews said exalted in new techniques as they moved further into abstraction toward "a kind of photographic minimalism".

In 2000, she began producing brightly hued photograms whose series titles reflected the objects or materials she used to interrupt or strike the paper (e.g., "Push Pins", "Penlights") or referenced visual phenomena, such as afterimages ("Blinks"). Reviewers describe her color photograms as "hyper-saturated, jewel-toned abstraction" they compare their fluid soaks of color to the stain painting of Helen Frankenthaler and Morris Louis and the painterly, draped fabric of Frans Hals and John Singer Sargent. comprises Carey's experimental, darkroom-less work using a large-format Polaroid 20 x 24 camera, which explores the possibilities of minimalist photography. These images—made without reference to a subject—defy fundamental expectations of "picture taking" through an image-making technique that she discovered, which exploits random developing emulsion flows by pulling the film from the camera (the "Pulls" series) and interrupting the dye-transfer process; in other cases, she rolls back the film, creating multiple exposures ("Rollbacks"), or mixes incompatible emulsions or developer to manipulate the process.

The resulting scroll-like, unframed panels feature conical loops or tongues of single colors plus black, white or gray (in panel groupings, multiple colors occur in a single work); they have introduced a unique form to the medium, the parabola. Centre Pompidou, Fox Talbot Museum, George Eastman Museum, Henry Art Gallery, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, as well as private collections. The Edge of Vision: The Rise of Abstraction in Photography (2013), A Century of Colour Photography: From the Autochrome to the Digital Age (2009), and A History of Women Photographers (1994).

In 2019, the Royal Photographic Society (London) named Carey one of its "Hundred Heroines" commemorating international women photographers. Carey has received awards from the Andy Warhol Foundation (2017, for a retrospective exhibition and book at the Burchfield Penney Art Center), the Polaroid Artists Support Program (1983-8, 2002), Her research also informed a traveling exhibition she curated, "Women in Colour: Anna Atkins, Color Photography & Those Struck by Light" (2017, 2019).

Carey has taught photography at the Hartford Art School since 1985. She has also taught at Bard College, the International Center for Photography, and Queens College, and been an artist-in-residence at Loughborough University in the United Kingdom.