Ellen Carey

Education

MFA, Photography, State University of New York, Buffalo

BFA, Printmaking, Kansas City Art Institute

Ellen Carey (NYC, USA), a Pictures Generation contemporary and member of Buffalo’s avant-garde with Cindy Sherman and Robert Longo, upends the medium’s collective histories in lens-based art, photography, and technology with her abstract, minimal “picture” signs.

Ellen Carey is an educator, independent scholar, guest curator, photographer, and lens-based artist. The Royal Photographic Society (RPS) named Carey one of the top 100 women photographers worldwide, one of 14 Americans. Her unique and experimental pictures have been seen in over 70 solo plus hundreds of group exhibits, reproduced in books, brochures, and other print matter.

Her collaboration with dunhill brand (London (2021), finds two new solo exhibitions – “Light Struck” at the Fox Talbot Museum, Lacock (England) parallels “Struck by Light” at the New Britain Museum of American Art (2023-24); and lectures/workshops at foam museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, plus Gallery at Duncaster and Five Points Gallery Annex, both local.

Her work featured in two group exhibitions at the {BnF Bibliothèque Nationale de France –Épreuves de la Matière – 2023-24 and at Noir et Blanc: une esthétique de la photographie – 2023-24; a solo show, Let There Be Light: The Black Swans of Ellen Carey at Galerie Miranda – 2022; a solo booth presentation by Jayne H. Baum at Paris Photo – 2018; and a solo exhibition at Offscreen, Hotel de Rothschild, presented by Galerie Miranda – 202). Her work was the inaugural exhibition at the Villa Benkemoun, Arles, with Galerie Miranda – 2019 and the luxury jeweller, Dinh Van, hosted selected works in its Saint Germain des Près boutique – 2022.

Photography Degree Zero (1996-2024) in Polaroid 20 X 24 and Struck by Light (1988-2024) in Photogram name her dual practices, while Pictus & Writ sees her published essays on Man Ray, Sol LeWitt, and Anna Atkins plus her own work. She is Associate Professor of Photography, Hartford Art School, University of Hartford, Connecticut.

Ellen Carey emphasizes photography’s indexical drawing with light and light with color. Her innovative, technical knowledge and burgeoning imagination dare viewers to engage with the arc of time beginning with the earliest memory of light and shadow up to the present of momentary rainbows.

Her performative record is a visual all or nothing, her ‘zero’. Her photographs no longer represent object-subject relations but rather the twin interplay of light and shadow, stark in black and white minimalism and freeing color itself into a kaleidoscope of abstraction that creates new “picture signs”.

Photo credit: Doug Levere, taken at the Polaroid 20 X 24 Studio in NYC