Ellen Carey (born 1952) is an American artist known for conceptual photography exploring 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 often compare to color-field painting. Carey’s sixty one-person exhibitions have been presented at museums, such as the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, International Center of Photography (ICP) and Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, alternative spaces such as Hallwalls and Real Art Ways, and many commercial galleries. Her work is in numerous museum collections, including those of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Centre Pompidou, and Smithsonian American Art Museum. In 2019, she was named one of the Royal Photographic Society (London) “Hundred Heroines”, recognizing leading women photographers worldwide. Los Angeles Times critic Leah Ollman describes her photography as “inventive, physically involving, process-oriented work” and her recent 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. “ In addition to her art career, Carey has also been a longtime educator at the Hartford Art School and a writer and researcher on the history of photography.
Table of Contents
- 1 Life and career
- 1.1 A Baker's Dozen
- 1.2 Vintage Photos 1971 Press Photo Pianist Ellen Carey Cregan noo07735
- 1.3 Ellen Carey
- 1.4 Exquisite Desire: Religion, the Erotic, and the Songs of Songs
- 1.5 Trout Recipe
- 1.6 Griffith in Context: A Multimedia Exploration of 'The Birth of a Nation'
- 1.7 James Gordon's Wife: A Novel ... 1871 [Leather Bound]
- 1.8 The Fruit of the Vine: Viticulture in Ancient Israel (Harvard Semitic Monographs)
- 1.9 Happy Go Lovely
- 1.10 Billboard Dad [VHS]
Life and career
Carey was born in New York City in 1952. 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 avant-garde while in graduate school at the State University of New York at Buffalo (MFA, 1978), which 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. 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.
During her first decade in New York, Carey was featured in prominent shows at PS1 (“The Altered Photograph,” 1979), the New Museum, White Columns, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the Bronx Museum of Art, the Sao Paulo Biennale (“The Heroic Figure,” traveling 1984-6), The Alternative Museum, and ICP, 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), and the Amon Carter Museum (2018). She is also included in the international traveling exhibit, “The Polaroid Project: At the Intersection of Art and Technology” (2017-20). Since 1991, Carey has divided time between living and working in Hartford, Connecticut and New York City.
Last update 2021-08-06