Ellen Carey

Her work belongs to the museum collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Centre Pompidou, and Smithsonian American Art Museum, among others. In 2019, she was named one of the Royal Photographic Society (London) "Hundred Heroines" recognizing leading women photographers worldwide. 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.

Ellen Carey studied at University at Buffalo and Kansas City Art Institute. The field of work recorded is photography. Work by Ellen Carey is recorded in the collections of Art Institute of Chicago, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Smithsonian American Art Museum.

• Name — Ellen Carey • Birthplace — New York City, New York, US • Field — Photography, Conceptual art • Education — State University of New York at Buffalo, Kansas City Art Institute • Website — Ellen Carey • Awards — National Endowment for the Arts Polaroid Artists Support Program Andy Warhol Foundation • Illustration — Ellen Carey, Self-Portrait, Polaroid 20 x 24 color positive print, 24" x 20" (image)/34" x 22" (object), 1986. Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art collection.

Carey was born in New York City. 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. 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 shows at PS1 ("The Altered Photograph", 1979), the New Museum, White Columns, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the Bronx Museum of Art, the São 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), the Amon Carter Museum (2018) and New Britain Museum (2023). She appeared in the international traveling exhibit, "The Polaroid Project: At the Intersection of Art and Technology" (2017–20) and the surveys, "Controlling the Chaos" (Carnegie Museum of Art, 2020) and "Alter Egos|Projected Selves" (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2021). Since 1991, Carey has divided time between living and working in Hartford, Connecticut and New York City. • Illustration — Ellen Carey, Color Theory, Polaroid 20 x 24 color positive print, 24" x 20", 1995. Private Collection.

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. 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. 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. 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."

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. 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. 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. 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. 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. • Illustration — Ellen Carey, Dings & Shadows, Color (C-Print) unique photogram, 24" x 20", 2013. Private Collection, New York, NY.

Carey began creating cameraless photograms in 1989, which specifically explored abstraction and conceptual issues at the basis of photography, through a process embracing chance, improvisation, and risk. Photograms date back to the dawn of photography, in work by mid-19th-century artists Anna Atkins and William Henry Fox Talbot—and later, Man Ray—who placed botanical specimens, salt, silver or other objects onto light-sensitive paper to create "shadow" images. Carey creates hers in total darkness using photosensitive paper, which she crumples, creases, obscures or filters and exposes to light, creating color, shadow and depth effects that record her actions (e.g., Color Theory, 1995). She began with black-and–white photograms, before shifting to muted color images that New York Times reviews said exalted in new techniques as they moved further into abstraction toward "a kind of photographic minimalism". 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"). 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; 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. • Illustration — Ellen Carey, Crush & Pull, Polaroid 20 x 24 color positive—unique, triptych, 80" x 22" (each)/80" x 66" (all), 2019.

Carey has written about and researched art-related topics such as the history of photography (including the first women photographer, Anna Atkins), color theory, and tetrachromacy and its relation to gender. She has published essays on Sol LeWitt ("Color Me Real", in Sol LeWitt: 100 Views), Man Ray ("At Play with Man Ray" in Aperture, which focused on her discovery of Ray's "hidden" signature in the 1935 photograph Space Writings (Self-Portrait)), and her own work (in The Polaroid Years and The Polaroid Project). Her research also informed a traveling exhibition she curated, "Women in Colour: Anna Atkins, Color Photography & Those Struck by Light" (2017, 2019). 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.