James Welling: Metamorphosis
Foreword by Ingried Brugger and Philippe Van Cauteren. ?Edited with texts by Heike Eipeldauer and Martin Germann. Conversation with the artist by Hal Foster
Marking the influential photographer’s first major European survey, this book features highlights from four decades of James Welling’s oeuvre.
Emerging out of the “Picture Generation”—a group of artists focused on a critique of photographic media—James Welling has gone on to experiment successfully in nearly every photographic genre. This monograph, designed by Joseph Logan in close collaboration with the artist, presents a selection of works from the early 1970s to today, demonstrating the artist’s conceptual foundations. Welling’s series are dialogues between image and matter, process and result, representation and abstraction. This volume includes, amongst other series, selections from Diary/Landscape, in which Welling matched the writing of his ancestors’ letters with Connecticut winter landscapes; Glass House a meditation on Philip Johnson’s 1949 residence, shot using colored filters; Degrades, pure color photograms created in the darkroom; and Wyeth and Choreograph, which track his early interest in painting and dance. The generous and vividly reproduced illustrations are accompanied by an extensive interview with the artist and critical essays that discuss Welling’s work in connection with American painting, post-modernism, and authorship, and the artist’s eloquently emotional photographic language.
Publisher: S.M.A.K. / Prestel
Artists: James Welling
Contributors: Ingried Brugger, Heike Eipeldauer, Hal Foster, Martin Germann, Philippe Van Cauteren
Designer: Joseph Logan
Printer: Grafisches Centrum Cuno, Calbe
Publication Date: 2017
Binding: Hardcover
Dimensions: 8 1/2 x 10 1/4 in (21.6 x 26 cm)
Pages: 192
Reproductions: 142 color
ISBN: 9783791356037
Retail: $60 | £45
Status: Available
James Welling
James Welling has been questioning the norms of representation since the 1970s. His work centers on an exploration of photography, shuffling the elemental components of the medium to produce a distinctly uncompromising body of work. Welling is also intensely interested in cultural and personal ideas of memory in his work. In opening up the medium of photography for experimentation, James Welling’s practice has influenced an entire generation of artists and photographers.