"Finitogram (Triptych), 2024" by Ellen Carey
Camera Less Operator
Finitogram (Triptych), 2024
Ellen Carey
Media: Chemigram
Print Sizes: 10" x 8" each
Frame Size: 28.25" x 14"
Price: NFS
STATEMENT
Finitogram
The Camera Less Operator or CLO opens a visual vade mecum to the finitogram, an anonymous – Anon. – photo-object gathered from throw-aways, abandoned sheets of photographic paper bearing random chemical marks that ‘strike a pose’ as light draws. CLO sees the once hidden, latent image become visible as the object begins at the zero of an unknown time, made somewhere in the void of a darkroom, left behind unfinished and un-signed until the photo object is rescued by CLO, the camera-less operator, in situ, a fellow light traveler; it has a story to tell.
No authors, just Anon., as names did not exist. In their place is the 19th-century term ‘cam-era operator’ for the unnamed photographer, an unknown person who explores new themes and visual language, pioneers in the global category of ‘vernacular photography’. We all have seen these pictures, lost and found in auction houses to flea markets.
This photo-object has traveled to create a new version of Duchamp’s ‘ready-made’ where time and chemistry partner with “light drawing” anew. The object’s name, finitogram, from the Italian non finito for incomplete works of art, now re-interprets the photogram, its legacy, and those practitioners. It reverses and expands the circle of time in its image-making toward an end to the use of the artist’s hand, while fore-fronting Conceptual Art, Abstract Expressionism, and Minimalism, while also introducing an aporia to the medium’s “picture signs” found in traditional genres of landscape, portrait, still life, and so on. What is Art … Art & Photography?
CLO and the finitogram project is a portfolio of small pictures of nothing that began in conditions of amber low light, often a sight (less) darkroom based in time and chemistry as the light-sensitive paper goes from its “light-tight” black bag, from total darkness, from in-visibility to begin its journey. These finitograms are unpredictable as they change in subtle non-color to hue in palette and enlarge in form. As the chemical clock ticks, this new getting ready-to-be-made from its once unfinished state, by time and by light, unfolds; it becomes finished, a finitogram. The historic photogram, now re-named as ready-made, adds to CLO’s handbook guide through photography’s nearly two centuries’ arc of light, photogram, non-color.
CLO, as the 21st-century camera ess operator visually consults Talbot, Daguerre, and Anna Atkins, the powerhouse tripod of 19th-century game changers. Talbot’s negative-to-positive duality of the photogram-as-image is doubled, while daguerreotypes are mirrored in the glossy polish of their pristine surfaces and crisp pictures. Talbot’s soft-focus, non-color compositions in blurry outlines see light’s ‘shadow’ while light’s first traces see color as light referencing Anna Atkins’ cyanotype images.
CLO finds the performance in the ‘black box’ of the darkroom, where pictures of nothing start blank, then finish. This image-making process forms a “linked ring” to the Surrealist game of “exquisite corpse”. What better way to make new and unique photo-objects than to play that parlor game, to find new ways to make art through the unconscious, a game of hide-and-seek. Hide the pictures, seek them out, do nothing, too. Let time and light draw; let those marks make themselves.
It is the 21st century after all.
When light becomes visible, the object speaks; CLO’s object says craquelure, pattern, shape, hue, abstract, process, minimal, photogram, black swans, light, beauty, non-color, wonder, invention, innovation. This series, for CLO and for us, says: Finitogram …!
BIO
Ellen Carey (b.1952, USA) is a photographer and lens-based artist who has been creating a unique body of experimental work for over thirty years. The artist established her reputation with a series of early self-portraits in which she overlaid photographic imagery with abstract graphic elements produced by manipulating her prints in the darkroom. Carey has since gone on to produce several extended series of abstract photographic works, including her Pulls, which are made using a large format 20X24 Polaroid camera, and her intensely colored Dings & Shadows camera-less photograms produced entirely in the darkroom.
The artist has been the subject of over fifty-five one-person and group exhibitions in museums, alternative spaces and commercial galleries, including Dings, Pulls and Shadows, The Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, TX, 2018; The Polaroid Project: At the Intersection of Art and Technology, Foundation for Exhibiting Photography at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); and The Unbearable Lightness - The 1980s, Photography, Film, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France. In 2020, the artist was chosen by the Royal Photography Society, London as one of their Hundred Heroines, honoring pioneering women photographers. In 2022, Carey’s work has been on exhibition in Alter Egos | Projected Selves at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and was featured on garments and accessories as part of a special collaboration with London menswear brand dunhill. Carey is enjoying two solo exhibitions, one at the New Britain Museum of American Art, New Britain, CT, and at the William Henry Fox Talbot Museum, Laycock Abbey, Wiltshire, UK, simultaneously she is included in two exhibitions at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris.
The artist’s work is represented in private and public collections worldwide, including the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL; Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, NY; Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; Dallas-Fort Worth Art Museum, TX; JP Morgan Chase Art Collection, New York, NY; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; and Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT.
