James Welling

From Painting, Dance, and Video to Photography

James Welling was born in Connecticut in 1951. He became interested in Color Field painting and Abstract Expressionism while still in high school and studied at Carnegie Mellon University with Gandy Brodie, a second-generation Abstract Expressionist. In 1969, a class visit took him to Mark Rothko’s studio, where he discussed Rothko’s predominantly black paintings with the artist.^*21 When John Cage and Merce Cunningham were in residence at Carnegie Mellon, Welling repeatedly attended their rehearsals and performances. He later described that week as “life-changing.” He studied modern dance at the University of Pittsburgh, then encountered video and Conceptual art under John Baldessari at the California Institute of the Arts.^*2 His early interest in fields of color remained visible in later works made with colored light.^*21 His engagement with the body, time, and chance through dance and through Cage and Cunningham later informed his photograms, serial works, and Choreograph.^*2

Video provided Welling’s entry into photography. His early tapes treated equipment-specific effects—noise from rough edits and abrupt shifts in white balance—as brief demonstrations. Stills photographed from a monitor on Tri-X film became his first gelatin silver prints. Welling has said that operating a large video camera and tripod led to his use of a 4 × 5 view camera in 1976 and, later, to scanners and digital cameras.^*3 Photography allowed him to bring his experience of painting, dance, and video into a single body of work while retaining the idiosyncrasies of equipment, darkroom reactions, and printing misregistration as parts of the image.

Frampton and Moholy-Nagy

Welling approached modern photography partly through the films and criticism of structural filmmaker Hollis Frampton. Frampton’s Artforum essays on Edward Weston and Paul Strand led him toward Strand. After seeing Strand’s 1972 retrospective at LACMA, Welling encountered the pairing of religious sculpture and portraiture in Mexican Portfolio as something strikingly contemporary.^*2 Welling has invoked Frampton’s “knight’s tour” as a metaphor for his own movement through different photographic possibilities from one series to the next.^*2 László Moholy-Nagy’s photograms and elevated viewpoints offered two related models: recording objects and light directly on photographic paper, and using the camera to construct a space unavailable to ordinary vision.^*12 Critics have connected New Abstractions to both Moholy-Nagy’s urban photographs and his photograms. In Welling’s work, camera-made images, cameraless processes, and negative reversal form a related set of methods for remaking perception.^*23

The Pictures Generation and Expressiveness

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Pictures Generation artists examined how established forms drawn from photography, film, and advertising produce models of identity and confer value on authorship.^*17 Alexander Bigman draws attention to Welling’s description of his early works as “images about the act of feeling,” placing them alongside Cindy Sherman, Sherrie Levine, and David Salle in a broader reconsideration of what it meant to be expressive.^*15 Sherman worked through performed personae, while Levine rephotographed canonical images. Welling used lighting, close-up views, exposure, and dark printing to turn aluminum foil, phyllo dough, and gelatin into images of black expanses and forceful ruptures. His concern lay in the image’s continuing effect on the body and emotions even after the material had been identified.^*18

Welling later described his relation to photographic history as a form of “ventriloquism.” He transferred the rules that sustain established photographic forms to new subjects. In the railroad photographs, converging tracks produce speed and distance. In the architectural works, frontal views, raking light, and reflection layer interior and exterior through glass. In the dance photographs, arrested gestures intersect as RGB color layers. To “ventriloquize through different photographic grammars,” in Welling’s formulation, meant making viewpoint, perspective, exposure, reflection, arrested movement, and methods of output operate again through different technologies and subjects.^*3

Delaying Recognition of the Subject

Welling’s early photographs depict specific objects while extending the time required to identify them. In Aluminum Foil, wrinkles and reflections suggest the depth of a star field or rocky terrain. The phyllo dough in Untitled can resemble a landscape or stage, while the black masses in Gelatin Photographs evoke organisms or matter in a state of collapse.^*1*5*6 The object never disappears from the image. Before it is understood, scale, space, and title generate other readings.

Welling has connected his “more abstract method” to the body, skin, and touch.^*21 In Torsos, the density and folds of mesh, the passage of light, and contact with photographic paper bring pressure and weight forward more strongly than perspectival space.^*18 Here, abstraction begins with a concrete object but allows surface, color, pressure, and depth to register before the subject can be described. The time a viewer needs to assemble meaning becomes part of the work.

Building Chance into the Process

For New Abstractions, Welling dropped strips of Bristol board onto film in darkness, fixing their positions, overlaps, and shadows as photograms.^*10 Welling established a sequence involving the shape and fall of the paper, exposure, development, selection, and reprinting, while leaving room for unforeseen arrangements. In a conversation reflecting on Cage and Cunningham, he described continuing to make decisions while accepting unexpected results between total indeterminacy and complete control.^*2 Chance entered the process as information: the material’s response could be observed and used to revise the next decision.

Treating Color as a Relation Within the Image

In Flowers, the contours of the plants remain legible while colors selected through filters and exposure replace their local color.^*30 For Glass House, Welling photographed Philip Johnson’s transparent architecture through colored materials, Mylar, diffraction gratings, and lens flare placed before the camera.^*7 The building’s straight lines remain intact as garden, interior, reflection, and colored material before the lens accumulate on a single plane, making interior and exterior—and the local colors of objects—difficult to separate at a glance. Welling has described the choice of viewpoint, the bodily movement of filters, changing light, and subsequent printing as a two-stage “performance.”^*2 Color shifts from describing the subject to regulating relations among contour, transparency, reflection, and depth.

Recasting Analog Operations in Digital Form

Welling treats analog and digital photography as a continuous history of manipulating positive and negative, misregistration, color separation, grain, and support. Some works shown in the 2024 exhibition Thought Objects refer to the Waterhouse effect in silver-based development. He created positive and negative versions of a digital image as “two virtual sheets of film,” offset them slightly, and combined them through equidensity processing. The resulting images, with sharpening and misregistration accentuated, were printed at large scale in UV-cured ink on aluminum composite panels.^*3 Digital images also involve channel processing, resolution interpolation, ink, support, and output dimensions. These choices determine contour, granularity, colored edging, and viewing distance. Welling reformulated judgments developed through analog photography as operations specific to digital production.

Aluminum Foil and Gelatin Photographs

For Aluminum Foil (1980–81), Welling folded sheets of foil borrowed from the restaurant where he worked, sometimes painted them black, and photographed them with a 4 × 5 camera. Dark contact prints the same size as the negatives maintain a one-to-one scale between object and image while turning wrinkles into spaces resembling star fields or rocky terrain.^*1*4 For Gelatin Photographs (1984), Welling cooked gelatin—the substance that binds the light-sensitive layer of gelatin silver paper—as food, mixed it with black ink, and placed it on seamless paper used for product photography. The material that makes the photograph and the object depicted in it become the same substance, turning photographic self-reference into the physical structure of the work.^*6

Degradés and New Abstractions

In Degradés, Welling exposed chromogenic paper to colored light, fixing fields of gradually shifting color. The Whitney Museum has described the work as evocative of Color Field painting.^*18 The color fields arise from the reaction of light and photographic paper. In New Abstractions, the positions, overlaps, and shadows of paper strips dropped in darkness are fixed as photograms.^*10 In both series, forms that resemble pictorial compositions are records of exposure, occlusion, contact, and time.

Diary / Landscape, Railroads, and Architecture

In Diary of Elizabeth and James Dixon / Connecticut Landscapes, photographs of Welling’s great-grandmother’s diary and other historical handwriting appear in the same sequence as contemporary views of family land.^*11 By placing actual sites, family documents, and the present moment of photography in relation, the sequence rereads the past across different records and times instead of fixing it in a single image. In the later Railroad Photographs and photographs of H. H. Richardson’s architecture, Welling uses the converging perspective of railroad photography and the frontal views, raking light, and repetition associated with architectural photography, adding speed, distance, and rhythm to the description of place. After testing how materials transform an image, he turned to the ways established documentary grammars direct the perception and memory of a site.^*3

Wyeth—Photographing Places Already Known Through Painting

Andrew Wyeth was a formative influence from the time Welling began painting in watercolor as a child. Beginning in 2010, he visited the landscapes, buildings, and interiors in Pennsylvania and Maine where Wyeth had worked, producing the color series Wyeth.^*27 Exhibition materials describe how Welling absorbed Wyeth’s restrained palette, contrasts of surface, and effects of light while using postproduction to approach the painter’s nonnaturalistic compositions.^*29 Welling has also noted Wyeth’s phrase “abstract flash” for a form that appears momentarily at the edge of vision.^*28 By photographing places already known through paintings, Welling brings the actual site, Wyeth’s pictorial world, and his own memory and color processing into a single photograph.

Flowers and Glass House

For Flowers, Welling registered flowers as photograms on black-and-white film, then printed the negatives onto chromogenic paper through color filters.^*30 In Glass House, he placed colored and diffractive materials before the lens while photographing transparent modern architecture.^*9 The Japanese exhibition Notes on Color presented both series through their control of light, shadow, and time.^*7 Across both series, filters shift from tools of color correction to instruments for exposing and photographing color itself.

Choreograph—Layering Three Photographs in RGB

In Choreograph, Welling assigns three black-and-white photographs—of dance, architecture, and landscape—to red, green, and blue channels and combines them in a single inkjet print. Bodily movement, architectural space, plants, and terrain become color layers that alter one another’s contours and depth, joining three sites of exposure within one perceptual space.^*13 The title joins choreograph, “to draw in space,” with photograph, “to draw with light,” returning Welling’s early experience of dance to photographic color channels and bodily perception.

Changing Styles as a Method

Across successive series, Welling has moved among close-up photography, landscape, architectural photography, photograms, three-color separation, and digital compositing. Following Frampton’s model of the “knight’s tour,” he has described an approach that passes through different points in photographic history instead of perfecting a single style.^*2 The Hammer Museum retrospective likewise framed his work across realism and transparency, abstraction and depiction, optics and description, and the material and chemical properties of photography.^*22 Changes in style became a way to compare what each technique makes visible, what it delays, and what kinds of time and bodily perception it produces.

A conversation organized by ICA Philadelphia presented Welling as an artist working at the intersection of photography and painting, in a lineage extending from Gustave Le Gray and Edward Steichen. It located this connection in his attention to concrete sensory experience and in the different painterly possibilities offered by contact printing, digital layering, inkjet printing, and other technologies.^*24 The color fields of Degradés, the transparent layers of Glass House, and the RGB composites of Choreograph create forms of color and layering specific to photography through light, photographic paper, filters, and digital processing.

Following Materiality Through the Output Process

In the early works, gelatin, emulsion, chemicals, paper, and physical contact determine the image surface. The Getty Museum’s 2015 exhibition Light, Paper, Process placed Welling within a history of material investigation extending from twentieth-century experimental photography, emphasizing his study of photographic paper’s sensitivity to light and its chemical processing.^*20 In the digital works, on-screen processing, ink, support, and output dimensions form one continuous production sequence. A MoMA discussion likewise addressed what constitutes a photograph after film and photographic paper, and how an inkjet printer might be understood as a photographic technology.^*8 Welling’s concern lies less in nostalgia for materials than in the decisions photographers make with each material and the ways their traces persist through digital processing.^*3 Recent works that print the same source image through silver-based processes, inkjet, and handmade emulsions—altering even the perceived age and gender of a face—make this idea concrete.^*16

Chris Wiley discussed the work of Walead Beshty, Liz Deschenes, Mariah Robertson, and Eileen Quinlan—artists concerned with supports, chemicals, lensless methods, and digital surfaces—within a lineage running from Talbot, Moholy-Nagy, and Man Ray through Welling.^*25 The 2008 Whitney Biennial also brought Welling and Beshty together in a public seminar as artists whose work takes photography’s own representational field as a subject and builds abstract compositions from ordinary objects.^*26 Together, these sources trace a historical sequence in which photographic supports and production technologies became subjects in their own right. They place Welling between the Pictures Generation’s examination of constructed images and a later generation’s attention to support, exposure, chemical processing, and digital surfaces.

Feeling and Reception in Constructed Images

Bigman interprets Welling’s photographs of the early 1980s as a reconsideration of expressiveness at a moment when faith in modernist self-expression had weakened.^*15 In Aluminum Foil, Drapes, and Gelatin Photographs, images that initially resemble vast spaces or damaged matter return to ordinary objects once their materials are known. This shift recasts feeling as an effect of material preparation, lighting, close-up photography, exposure, title, and the darkness of the print. The emotional force appears as something produced through the photograph’s construction. Viewers can recognize that an image has been deliberately constructed and still experience its sensory force.

The 2012 exhibition Mind on Fire presented Welling’s early close-ups, photograms, and color-field works alongside materials from the period in which they were made.^*19 The 2014 ICP Infinity Award recognized Welling for producing both depictive and abstract images and for bringing an experimental sensibility to photography.^*14 These exhibitions and the award presented his early material experiments, architectural and landscape records, cameraless works, color, and digital output as a continuous inquiry into how different techniques produce perception and feeling.