The Whitney Visual Explorer

Artist Biennial

James Welling

1951–

51 works in the collection 5 exhibitions at the Whitney

Biography

Trained in conceptual and video art at the California Institute of the Arts, James Welling taught himself photography on a second-hand camera and photographic processing before moving to New York in 1978. There, in 1980, he began to produce photographs of crumpled pieces of aluminum foil, torn from a large roll borrowed from the restaurant at which he worked, sometimes painting the surface of the foil in black and emphasizing the shadows through dramatic lighting. He developed the photographs as very dark contact prints, the same size as the negative from his four-by-five-inch view camera, in order to draw a direct link between object and image. The result is what Welling has termed “obscure looking pictures,” characterized by a densely textured field of light and shadow: three dimensions depicted in two.

Although Welling terms these works “abstract photographs,” he acknowledges that “a photograph can never really be abstract because it’s always of something.” The works seem nonrepresentational and give no clue as to orientation, yet evocative titles such as The Wayfarer 1980 point to the pictures’ potential to carry meaning or narrative, and Welling has described them as “glittering, emotional landscapes of an unknown dimension.” The aluminum foil works thus explore both the material and conceptual properties of photography itself, highlighting the way in which it allows meaning to be created in the mind of the viewer.

Works in the collection

Exhibitions at the Whitney