Ellen Carey is an American artist known for conceptual photography that explores non-traditional approaches involving process, exposure and paper.Ollman, Leah. "Ellen Carey's photograms turn plain paper into a topographic head trip," Los Angeles Times, April 10, 2017. Retrieved June 13, 2019.Zimmer, William. "A Family Album of Empty Pictures," The New York Times, December 10, 2000. Retrieved June 13, 2019.Wiley, Chris. "An Outlier to the Pictures Generation Gets Her Due," The New Yorker, February 13, 2023. Retrieved January 27, 2025. 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.Westfall, Stephen. "Ellen Carey at ICP and Simon Cerigo," Art in America, November 1987, p. 181.Schwabsky, Barry. "Ellen Carey, Ricco/Maresca Gallery," Artforum, November 1998. Retrieved June 13, 2019.Hagen, Charles. "Art in Review, Ellen Carey," The New York Times, December 23, 1994. Retrieved June 13, 2019. 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." New York Times critic William Zimmer wrote that her work "aspires to be nothing less than a reinvention, or at least a reconsideration, of the roots or the essence of photography."
Carey's solo exhibitions have been presented at museums including the Amon Carter Museum of American Art,Amon Carter Museum of American Art. Mirrors of Chance: Photograms by Ellen Carey , Fort Worth, TX: Amon Carter Museum of American Art, 2017. Retrieved June 13, 2019. International Center of Photography (ICP), New Britain Museum of American Art,New Britain Museum of American Art. "Ellen Carey: Struck by Light," Exhibitions. Retrieved January 27, 2024. Fox Talbot Museum (UK)Candlin, Rachel. "Henry Fox Talbot: Exhibition pays homage to photography pioneer," BBC, May 27, 2023. Retrieved January 27, 2024. and Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art,Rosoff, Patricia. "A Fresh Look at the Mystery of Photography," Hartford Advocate, December 9, 2004. and alternative spaces such as HallwallsKino, Carol. "Renaissance in an Industrial Shadow," The New York Times, May 2, 2012. Retrieved June 13, 2019. and Real Art Ways.Rexer, Lyle. "Ellen Carey at Real Art Ways," Art in America, June 2001. Her work belongs to the museum collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art,Metropolitan Museum of Art. Untitled (Self-Portrait), 1987, Ellen Carey, Collection. Retrieved June 13, 2019. Whitney Museum of American Art,Whitney Museum of American Art. "Ellen Carey," Artists. Retrieved June 13, 2019. Los Angeles County Museum of Art,Los Angeles County Museum of Art. "Ellen Carey," Collections. Retrieved June 13, 2019. Centre Pompidou,Centre Pompidou. "Ellen Carey," Artists. Retrieved June 13, 2019. and Smithsonian American Art Museum, among others.Smithsonian American Art Museum. "Ellen Carey," Artists. Retrieved June 13, 2019. In 2019, she was named one of the Royal Photographic Society (London) "Hundred Heroines" recognizing leading women photographers worldwide.The Royal Photographic Society. "Ellen Carey," Hundred Heroines. Retrieved June 13, 2019.Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. "Warhol Foundation Announces Spring 2017 Grant Recipients,". Retrieved June 13, 2019.Akus Gallery, Eastern Connecticut State University. "Biography," Let There Be Light: The Black Swans of Ellen Carey, Willimantic, CT: Eastern Connecticut State University Akus Gallery, 2014. 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.Hartford Art School. Ellen Carey Directory. Retrieved January 31, 2025.Carey, Ellen. "Color Me Real," in Sol LeWitt: 100 Views (Susan Cross, Denise Markonish eds.), New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009. Retrieved June 13, 2019.Carey, Ellen. "At Play with Man Ray," Aperture, Fall 2011.
Life and career Carey was born in New York City.Underexposed. "Ellen Carey," Retrieved June 13, 2019. She studied at the Art Students League of New York (1970) before attending the Kansas City Art Institute, where she earned a BFA in 1975. She was part of a mid-1970s Buffalo, NY avant-garde while in graduate school at the State University of New York at Buffalo (MFA, 1978). It included artists Cindy Sherman, Robert Longo and Charles Clough and spawned the alternative spaces Hallwalls and Center for Exploratory and Perceptual Arts (CEPA), each of which held exhibitions of her early painted self-portraits.Strickland, Carol. "Wish You Were There," Art in America, May 24, 2012. Retrieved June 13, 2019.Pesanti, Heather. Wish You Were Here: The Buffalo Avant-Garde in the 1970s , Buffalo, NY: Albright-Knox Art Gallery, 2012. Retrieved June 13, 2019. In 1979, after receiving a CAPS grant, she moved to New York City and rented a studio in Soho. She was one of the first artists invited into the Polaroid Corporation's program to sponsor artists interested in exploring the potential of its "instant film"; the technology played a key role in her Neo-Geo, post-psychedelic self-portraits of the 1980s and her later "Photography Degree Zero" abstract work.Lombino, Mary-Kay and Peter Buse. "The Polaroid Years: Instant Photography and Experimentation," New York: Prestel, 2013. Retrieved June 13, 2019.Keats, Jonathon. "This Dazzling Polaroid Exhibit Shows How Tech Companies Can Learn The Art Of Disruption From Artists," Forbes, Aug 31, 2017. Retrieved June 13, 2019.Griffin, Jonathan. "Ellen Carey/M+B, Los Angeles, USA," Frieze, March 2016. Retrieved June 13, 2019.
During her first decade in New York, Carey was featured in shows at PS1 ("The Altered Photograph", 1979), the New Museum, White Columns,Linker, Kate. "Public Vision/White Columns," Artforum, November 1982, p. 77–8. Retrieved June 13, 2019. the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the Bronx Museum of Art,Grundberg, Andy. "Artists' Works Are at the Center of the Action," The New York Times, October 3, 1982. Retrieved June 13, 2019. the São Paulo Biennale ("The Heroic Figure", traveling 1984-6), The Alternative Museum,Aletti, Vince. "Choices," The Village Voice, December 8, 1987. and ICP,Grundberg, Andy. "Photography," The New York Times, July 5, 1987. Retrieved June 13, 2019. among others. Her one-person exhibitions include a ten-year survey at ICP (1987), and shows at the Center for Photography at Woodstock (1996), Real Art Ways (2000), Museum of Contemporary Photography (2002), Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art (2004), Lyman Allyn Art Museum (2006),Genocchio, Benjamin. "Feminist Artworks With an Edge," The New York Times, January 7, 2007. Retrieved June 13, 2019. the Amon Carter Museum (2018)Blay, Christopher. "Trio," Ft. Worth Weekly, January 24, 2018. Retrieved June 13, 2019. and New Britain Museum (2023). She appeared in the international traveling exhibit, "The Polaroid Project: At the Intersection of Art and Technology" (2017–20)Ewing William A. and Barbara P. Hitchcock (eds.) The Polaroid Project: At the Intersection of Art & Technology, University of California Press, 2017. Retrieved June 13, 2019. and the surveys, "Controlling the Chaos" (Carnegie Museum of Art, 2020) and "Alter Egos|Projected Selves" (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2021).Carnegie Mellon Museum. "Controlling the Chaos," Exhibitions, 2020. Retrieved January 27, 2024.Metropolitan Museum of Art. "Alter Egos|Projected Selves," Exhibitions, 2021. Retrieved January 27, 2024.
Since 1991, Carey has divided time between living and working in Hartford, Connecticut and New York City.Brown, Susan Rand. " Ellen Carey," Art New England , March - April 2017. Retrieved June 13, 2019.
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.Rexer, Lyle. The Edge of Vision: The Rise of Abstraction in Photography , New York: Aperture, 2013. Retrieved June 13, 2019.Gotthardt, Alexxa. "10 Artworks to Collect at AIPAD," Artsy, April 8, 2016. Retrieved June 13, 2019.Kordic, Angie. "These Abstract Photographers Redefine Perception of the Real," Widewalls, May 22, 2016. Retrieved June 13, 2019. 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.Fleischer, Donna. "The Black Swans of Ellen Carey: Of Necessary Poetic Realities," Let There Be Light: The Black Swans of Ellen Carey, Willimantic, CT: Eastern Connecticut State University Akus Gallery, 2014. 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.Hatt, Etienne. "The Unbearable Lightness. The 1980s," ArtPress, November 2, 2016.Hirsch, Robert. [Light and Lens: Photography in the Digital Age], Burlington, MA: Elsevier/Focal Press, 2018. Retrieved June 13, 2019. 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.Zimmer, William. "'The Colt Four' of Hartford: From Guns to Brushes," The New York Times, July 12, 1992. Retrieved June 13, 2019. 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.Caley, Shaun. "Ellen Carey, Art City," Flash Art, Summer 1986, p. 72.
In 1984, she turned to brilliantly hued, multiple-exposure color images, made with one of only five existing Polaroid 20 × 24 cameras, which were cooler, androgynous, and more aesthetically seductive.Schwabsky, Barry. "Ellen Carey at Art City," Artscribe, September/October 1986. This work departed from traditional portraiture in no longer seeking to capture the character or identity of its subjects; rather, Carey or others served as de-individualized stand-ins for the human spirit, seamlessly disappearing into and merging with Op Art and Pop patterns evoking technology, biology, consciousness, time, and perhaps artificial intelligence.Zimmer, William. "Photographs With Surprises," The New York Times, April 30, 2000. Retrieved June 13, 2019. Critics such as Barry Schwabsky suggested that the specific qualities of the patterns opened interpretive possibilities and raised notions of the self, variously, as infinitely complex, unknowable, fractured, constructed from readymade cultural forms, or spiritually seeking.
"Struck by Light": Photograms (1989– )