Ellen Carey
1952

Ellen Carey is an American artist known for conceptual photography that explores non-traditional approaches involving process, exposure and paper. Her work has ranged from painted and multiple-exposure, Polaroid 20 x 24, Neo-Geo self-portraits beginning in the late 1970s to cameraless, abstract photograms and minimal Polaroid images from the 1990s onward, which critics compare to color-field painting. Los Angeles Times critic Leah Ollman describes her photography as "inventive, physically involving, process-oriented work" and her photograms as "performative sculptures enacted in the gestational space of the darkroom," whose pure hues, shadows and color shifts deliver "optical buzz and conceptual bang." New York Times critic William Zimmer wrote that her work "aspires to be nothing less than a reinvention, or at least a reconsideration, of the roots or the essence of photography."

Carey's solo exhibitions have been presented at museums including the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, International Center of Photography (ICP), New Britain Museum of American Art, Fox Talbot Museum (UK) and Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, and alternative spaces such as Hallwalls and Real Art Ways. Her work belongs to the museum collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Centre Pompidou, and Smithsonian American Art Museum, among others. In 2019, she was named one of the Royal Photographic Society (London) "Hundred Heroines" recognizing leading women photographers worldwide. In addition to her art career, Carey is an associate professor of photoography at the Hartford Art School and a writer and researcher on the history of photography.