Diary/Landscape - Hardcover

Welling, James

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 022620412X ISBN 13: 9780226204123

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2014

Synopsis

For more than thirty-five years, James Welling has explored the material and conceptual possibilities of photography. Diary/Landscape―the first mature body of work by this important contemporary artist―set the framework for his subsequent investigations of abstraction and his fascination with nineteenth- and twentieth-century New England.

In July 1977, Welling began photographing a two-volume travel diary kept by his great-grandmother Elizabeth C. Dixon, as well as landscapes in southern Connecticut. In one closely cropped image, lines of tight cursive share the page with a single ivy leaf preserved in the diary. In another snowy image, a stand of leafless trees occludes the gleaming Long Island sound. In subject and form, Welling emulated the great American modernists Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, and Walker Evans―a bold move for an artist associated with radical postmodernism. At the same time, Welling’s close-ups of handwriting push to the fore the postmodernist themes of copying and reproduction.

A beautiful and moving meditation on family, history, memory, and place, Diary/Landscape reintroduced history and private emotion as subjects in high art, while also helping to usher in the centrality of photography and theoretical questions about originality that mark the epochal Pictures Generation. The book is published to accompany the first-ever complete exhibition of this series of pivotal photographs, now owned by the Art Institute of Chicago.

About this title

About the Author:

James Welling was born in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1951 and studied art at the Wadsworth Atheneum, the West Hartford Art League, Carnegie Mellon University, and the California Institute of the Arts, where he received his MFA in 1974. His work has been the subject of survey exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Fotomuseum Winterthur; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and the Cincinnati Art Museum. His books include James Welling / The Mind on Fire, James Welling: Monograph, Glass House, and Light Sources. In 2014, he received the International Center for Photography’s 2014 Infinity Award in Art and he received the 1999 DG BANK-Förderpreis Fotografie from the Sprengel Museum in Hannover. He is professor in the Department of Art at University of California, Los Angeles.

Review:

“Welling is one of the most important photographers of our period. A few photographs from Diary/Landscape have seen print before, but this is in a sense a new work, transforming the pictures we already knew by returning them to the complete series, published here for the first time.” (Walter Benn Michaels)

“Welling is doubtless among the greatest conceptual artists utilizing photography anywhere in the world today. The Diary/Landscape pictures are cornerstones in this artist's output that deal with place and the very history of this medium, but also the essence of photography; time, memory, and death.” (James Crump)

“By turns elegiac and sweet and sad and funny and inscrutable, and also unfailingly beautiful. Diary/Landscape is a fine and too-rare example of the type of book that offers much imaginative space in which the viewer may—indeed, must—roam.” (Tim Carpenter, Photo-Eye)

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 022620412X
• ISBN 13: 9780226204123
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 160