James Welling

Lauded by photographers, artists, and critics for his influence on the contemporary generation of art photographers, James Welling has created beautiful and uncompromising photographs for over thirty-five years. Operating in the hybrid ground between painting, sculpture, and traditional photography, Welling is first and foremost a photographic practitioner enthralled with the possibilities of the medium. James Welling: Monograph will provide the most thorough presentation of the artist’s work to date, as well as offer an indispensible resource for those interested in this artist’s remarkable, foundational practice. Since the mid-1970s, Welling’s work has fluidly explored a mercurial set of issues and ideas: the tenets of realism and transparency, abstraction and representation, optics and description, personal and cultural memory, and the material and chemical nature of photography. To date, the artist has been the subject of numerous catalogs addressing his more than twenty-five different bodies of work—Welling’s “substantive investigation of the spectrum of abstract to figurative,” as one curator has described it. Yet no book has appeared with the ambition of linking these bodies of work together by examining the primary threads that run through them all. That is, until now. Sumptuously produced, James Welling: Monograph, presents a large selection of recent series, from 2000 through to the present, comingled with important early and iconic works made in the preceding decades. Chief curator of the Cincinnati Art Museum, James Crump, working closely with the artist, contributes an extensive introductory essay, and the volume will also include text contributions by Mark Godfrey, Thomas Seelig, and an interview with Eva Respini, associate curator in the Department of Photography at MoMA.