James Welling

#17 Pink 2005 101

#17 Pink is a photogram, a photographic image produced without the use of a camera. Here, the artist placed plumbago blossoms on a sheet of eight-by-ten-inch film and exposed it to light. The negative was then projected onto Kodak...

Stowe 2006 101

Welling employs simple materials like crumpled aluminum foil, wrinkled fabric and pastry dough and directly exposes them as photograms, playing with the image in the process of revealing it. Although Welling’s approach to photography is more...

James Welling has a long-standing interest in pushing the technical and conceptual boundaries of photography. His practice takes photographic norms or the representational field itself as its subject and, through material or digital manipulations, Welling investigates abstraction, turning everyday space or mundane objects into something uncanny but poetic.