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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, Neogeo self-portraits beginning in the late 1970s to cameraless, abstract 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. Lacock Abbey (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.
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.
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.
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").Ellen Carey website. "Struck By Light," Artworks. Retrieved June 13, 2019. Reviewers describe her color photograms as "hyper-saturated, jewel-toned abstraction" suggesting light candies, paper diamonds or asymmetrical kaleidoscopes, in which color is the subject itself;Furman, Anna. "Pushing the Outer Limits of Photography," New York Magazine, July 25, 2016. Retrieved June 13, 2019.Vasseur-Lamine, Leïla. "Mirrors of Chance," Wall International Magazine, December 15, 2018. Retrieved June 13, 2019. 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. Considering them conceptually, Leah Ollman wrote, "Throughout this body of work, the paper's surface does double duty as object and subject, material and image. The literal and the abstract merge."
Carey's "Caesura" series (2016–18) features vertical breaks in color along central axes with fine, radiating vein-like fissures that she creates by creasing or accordion-folding the paper. The "Dings & Shadows" series (2010– ) introduces greater compositional range with dense surfaces of wrinkles and crumples ("dings") occurring at all angles, which Carey draws out with a penlight to create shadow and depth; she has often exhibited them in installations of up to twenty panels. Her "Zerograms" (2018) reflect elements of her parallel "Pulls" series, incorporating a stark, geometric void in their centers that suggests a new sense of illusory space.
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. Her early "Pulls" often used a subdued palette, as in the three installations, Mourning Wall (2000), Birthday Portrait (1997) and Family Portrait (1996), which expressed grief over family losses; William Zimmer described the diverse textures of Mourning Wall's gray slabs as achieving the effect of relief sculpture. Her later "Pulls" and related series often incorporate startling flares or "waterfalls" of bright, sometimes overlapping color against blazing white grounds.
Critics suggest they recall the monochrome "swoops" of Ellsworth Kelly or the lozenges and plumes of color-field painters Morris Louis and Larry Poons. In addition to presenting the positive Polaroid images, Carey is singular in also presenting the peeled-off negatives as works of equivalent artistic substance. Reviewers describe these elemental positive and negative works—borne of life-changing loss and existential crisis for Carey—as an emptying out of the image in which the process itself becomes the subject seen in the final, immediate result.Wang, Susan. "Ellen Carey," Widewalls, May 24, 2016. Retrieved June 13, 2019. Artforum's Barry Schwabsky wrote that unlike some abstract photography, this work "represents a real disruption of the assumed link between photographic image and referent."
Carey showed new "Pulls" alongside older work in the solo exhibitions "Light Struck" (Fox Talbot Museum, 2023) and "Struck by Light" (New Britain Museum, 2023–24), the largest survey to date of her photograms and lens-based prints. The shows included her Crush & Pull with Hands & Penlights works (2022–23) made using a Polaroid 20 x 24 instant camera, which reflect black space, spooling lightning flashes of color, and amorphous forms with darting hands.Brown, Nell Porter. "Lighting the World," Harvard Magazine, November 2023. Retrieved January 27, 2025.
In 2019, the Royal Photographic Society (London) named Carey one of its "Hundred Heroines" commemorating international women photographers.The Royal Photographic Society. "Hundred Heroines: Celebrating Women in Photography Today," Hundred Heroines. Retrieved June 13, 2019.Dunne, Susan. " University of Hartford art professor named one of world's best 100 photographers," Hartford Courant, January 23, 2019. Retrieved June 13, 2019. 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), Connecticut Commission on the Arts (1998, 2001), New York State Federation for Artists (1986), Massachusetts Council on the Arts (1986), and National Endowment for the Arts (1984), among others.
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.
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