Crush & Pull

"How is this picture made?" and "What is this a picture of?" are questions asked about my work. They address photography as process and the conundrum of an image without a picture 'sign' to read. Light's immateriality challenges its makers today, analog versus digital, doubles our challenges. "What is a 21st century photograph?" finds my answer in partnering 19th century photogram with 20th century Polaroid's instant technology. "What do these two have in common?" and "Where do they overlap?" My answer sees the negative.

Crush & Pull combines Polaroid and photogram using the Polaroid negative to create new abstract forms and blended hues with experimental approaches and innovative process-driven methods located in: chemistry-laden Polaroid pods and the light-tight color darkroom. Here, Polaroid's 20th century instant technology meets the wonder of 19th century photograms.

Crush & Pull links my photographic experiments in color with process, minimalism and abstraction, light or variations to zero exposure, uniting my twin practices Struck by Light and Photography Degree Zero for the first time. Crush & Pull bridges ideas from my own photograms and its history to ideas in Polaroid and instant technology's history. My project revisits the negative, rich in -- metaphor, object, picture 'sign' -- that delivers a whole new approach to picture making, underscored in concept, context, content, with a unique, new photographic object that has never been seen or done before.

The history of the 'shadow' in art is cited in photogram, a paper negative (1834) contact printed for its positive (1840). Polaroid 20 X 24 (circa 1980s) makes a large negative transferring it in development to make the positive (www.20X24Studio.com) in a one-step, peel-away process. Although the negative-to-positive duality is similar, the negative is often forgotten, remaining "hidden", a means to an end.

Crush & Pull starts with Polaroid's negative, reversing time-honored photogram methods whereby the image ends as a negative. Polaroid's negative, physically crushed (touching an emulsion's surface taboo) by me breaks tradition, it becomes both object and the receiver of light. In traditional photograms, an object is placed between light and light sensitive paper, it is the referent. After exposure, what remains is a silhouetted image, a ghostly shadow of the object outlined in the negative.

In my work, the referent is removed, I use only light, photography's indexical, in the color darkroom no light is allowed, except upon exposure. Replacing 'normal' chemistry with dyes in the Polaroid's "pods" escalates these breaks in photography's collective histories, letting light create my Crush & Pull as a Polaroid Photogram* a new 21st photographic object.

* Photogram on Polacolor Negative Print/Polacolor Dye Diffusion Positive Print

Ellen Carey
2018

Light Struck by Ellen Carey at Fox Talbot Museum, Lacock, England.

Ellen Carey: Struck By Light at the New Britain Museum of American Art, New Britain, CT.

An Outlier To The Pictures Generation Gets Her Due, Chris Wiley on Ellen Carey, The New Yorker, 2023.

Ellen Carey in Épreuves de la Matière: La photographie contemporaine et ses metamorphoses, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.