Today, the name James Welling is famous due to his skill in photography. However, it turns out that this finest American photographer did not really have a background on photography. A native of Hartford, Connecticut, he was born in 1951 and spent a lot of his childhood near the border of Simsbury. His interest in art was honed in 1963; together with his friend, Julie Post, he pursued to become an artist. By 1965, he enrolled in one of Hartford’s finest arts schools, the Wadsworth Atheneum where he began his first attempt in painting using watercolor pigments as his only medium. In his biography, Welling cites three names of the people who had a greater influence on his career: the three people that he was referring to were Andrew Wyeth, Charles Burchfield, and Edward Hopper. Throughout his lifetime, he studied in the Carnegie Mellon University beginning from 1969 up to the 1971 with few notable artists such as Connie Fox and the late Robert Tharsing to name a few. However, while studying in the 1970s, he had already begun his first photographic expedition based from existing works of art like sculptures and paintings. The main theme he emphasized on his work was Minimalism and in contrast with the current photographs that Welling did in the later years, the photos he first made were only monochrome black and white prints. Most of the photographs made by Welling focused on the still life landscapes. Initially he used to work on his images by exposing them to light through the use of unconventional “shutter less camera”. To counter the presence of the white light on his prints, Welling often resorted to “heat” his prints while the image processing in order to create a sharper contrast of clear distinct lines balanced by the photograph’s lightness. Some of his earlier work was Degrades which was a sequence of “colored photograms” dominated with chiaroscuro. For his equipment, the artist used Polaroid camera to perfectly capture his images and sharpen them a great deal to emphasize the print’s themes. This was done in 1986 and continued to photograph detailed images from nature but with a messy and abstract designs. (James Welling.net, “Biography”). The choice of camera leads to the changes in image quality. Because of his outstanding performance, he has been nominated for awards and his works were exhibited throughout the country. One of his exhibitions back in 2014 was the collection of still life landscape pictures which composed of a hundred different kinds of natural images that he made between 1977 up to 1986. He also has books; Beyond Resemblance published in 2015, Les Voies Ferrées/St. Etienne et La Plaine du Forez published in 1990. Aside from photography, he is also credited for producing The Moment which had been previously showed in three years ago in the Tribeca Film Festival. Welling is currently a member of the arts faculty of the University of California Los Angeles where he teaches photography. He also holds MFA and BFA degrees which he obtained from the prestigious California Institute of the Arts. (UCLA, “James Welling - Professor, Photography”). This essay features some of his interesting exhibitions titled Choreograph a collection of pictures installed and available for public viewing at the David Zwiner in New York City. Featured in this gallery were the photos he took using a 35mm camera. His image sizes vary from small, medium, and large formats and appear to have been manipulated digitally. The images featured in this collection embody the post-modern Technicolor that combines polychromatic colors to mimic chiaroscuro. The depth created by the contrasting colors made it possible for the artist to produce prints that utilize the light to create drama, illuminating the entire print just like the styles of the Impressionist painters. Much of the pictures retain the realist perspective yet the artist did not focused on depicting his subjects as real as they appear in nature. One of the prints titled, 4910 (see fig. 1) still shows the contours and the physical outline of the woman’s body and yet, the remaining figure of another person embracing her was blurred out from the image. Splatter effects and other abstract composition of lines dominate the photo. This print was also a polychrome image of orange and grey green colors. Another image from the collection is the print 8634 (see fig. 2) which is also a polychrome image that somehow resembles the film negatives. The figures of the people can still be seen on the picture but the colors explode into a cacophony of contrasting neon colors. Personally, I think the image collections featured in the exhibition shares a strong connection to Andy Warhol’s pop culture prints wherein he also used pictures, paintings depicted in polychromatic color palette to highlight the images. Furthermore, the style he used on his prints made the photos of a regular dance class to appear more exciting, dynamic, and most of all dramatic. The opposing colors he used on every image produced a “negatives” or black and white images from the cameras film but instead of sticking on the tradition, Welling’s images used the different colors to create chiaroscuro highlighting the positions of their feet, the gracefulness of their movements, the body, as well as the surroundings, making it appear as unworldly and abstract. However, what I do not like on the collection were the artist’s occasional use of curved and abstract shapes such as those which can be seen on 0962 (see fig. 3) images 9910 (see fig. 4) and 0123 (see fig. 5). The foreground on these prints were tumultuous and given the bright opposing colors used, the inclusion of any other lines and shapes creates a distorted appearance that somehow fails to let the viewer’s eye concentrate on the center theme. The background is not muted and overly designed just like the foreground. In this case, those people who are not used to photographic abstraction might find these images difficult to discern due to their abstract nature. Nevertheless, despite the qualities and the eccentric style presented by Welling in his photographic collection, he noted that the quality of the images presented on the Choreography involves the trial and error process and he quipped that making the image to have more colors to make it “work” and livelier is “extremely exciting” and “messy” at the same time. (Moss, “James Welling, Now in Technicolor”).
The next image titled 0521(see fig. 6) was another type of photograph he made that uses abstract properties of the line in order to distort or mutilate the appearance of the image. Here, the image uses a kaleidoscope of opposing colors such as orange, red, blue, and green to highlight the drama of the scenery. At the center, two people can be seen in the kneeling position as they attempt to learn the movements of the new dance. The background was fairly semi-muted; only abstract shapes and with minimal colors filled it which is the opposite of the highly grandiose foreground imagery. In this print, somehow it reminded me of the abstract expressionism works made by Munch, especially the colors that Welling used portrays quite a crazed moment in the dance. In figure 7, the author presents another Technicolor image which resembled the old sepia prints of the late 19th century, but the modern rendition of this work was the fact that the print was not made using monotone of black and white pigments but instead, the print is polychromatic and the light was thoroughly used to make the scenery almost dramatic and unworldly. Figure 8 is a type of print which is soft to look at; in contrast to the previous images made by Welling, this only used pigments to create abstract shapes such as triangles covering the opposite directions with the vertex placed on the center. This is a fairly balanced photograph because it still retains realism, depth, and the inclusion of the implied triangles created by the shapes makes the vanishing point at the center, therefore, making the image look three-dimensional. Furthermore, figures 9-11 are the type of prints which resembled closely the Impressionist paintings of the Monet and Cassat. For instance, looking closely on figure 9, the outlines of the subjects can be barely discerned due to the presence of too much light illuminating the entire place. Abstract shapes of squares and rectangles are implied by the colors. In the tenth image, this print resembles Monet and Cassat’s landscape scenery still life, but only it is done using monochrome blue pigment whereas on the eleventh print, the work is also similar to the image in fig. 8 but the only thing that contrasts this image from was the quality. Image quality is barely visible, almost blurred out from the scenery; hence, the audience must look on the image as close as possible to view the subject. But on a fair distance, the only thing that is visible was the implied triangles set on the center and on the sides with yellow and red colors. Another image that closely resembles realism was fig. 12 which portrays an empty waiting place, the background was not overly done; the orange-yellow combination and the presence of the dead trees surround the shed from the late afternoon sunlight. The land below is frozen and covered with white snow. This image is probably the well-done of all the prints because it does not use any abstract elements at all, the colors still remained psychedelic but it only emphasized the illusion of the passage of time, the shed isolated from the world but yet functions to give people shelter in the times of weather disturbances. Meanwhile, the last three sets of pictures taken from Welling’s exhibition called Flowers composed of images that are polychromatic yet at the same time, the images 13 to 15 were enhanced to portray an unworldly appearance. The foreground in all of these prints was muted to white which a great thing for the viewers because it lets their eyes focus on the images on the foreground which is the branches of flowers and leaves. Somehow, these images closely resemble the photographic modernized rendition of the Oriental silk scroll paintings especially Ogata Korin’s flowers. No abstract shapes were used but rather the opposition of colors on each of the prints creates the drama that nature is dynamic and constantly changing. The tranquility on these images are achieved mostly because Welling did not used abstractness to enhance the image so these pictures are not that messy unlike the other images presented previously in this paper. Altogether, a conclusion derived from these pictures sums up the fact that any skilled artist can manage to present his style through photography by combining artistic elements in paintings to create a world of dramatic contrasts and instability; a set of prints that is so chaotic yet beautiful at the same time.
Works Cited
James Welling Exhibition “Choreograph”, 2015. David Zwirner. Museum Exhibit.
James Welling Exhibition “Flowers”. N.d. Museum Exhibit.
"James Welling Professor, Photography". UCLA Department of Art Faculty. Web. 10 Apr. 2016.
"James Welling". Jameswelling.net. Web. 10 Apr. 2016.
Moss, Hilary. "James Welling, Now In Technicolor". The New York Times Style Magazine. N.p., 2015. Web. 10 Apr. 2016.
