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Ellen Carey, a Pictures Generation contemporary and member of Buffalo’s avant-garde —- Cindy Sherman and Robert Longo —- upends the medium's collective histories in art and technology with abstract, minimal “picture” signs. Photography Degree Zero and Struck by Light names her twin practices, while Pictus & Writ supports her creative tripod with writing. The Royal Photographic Society (RPS) named Carey one of the top 100 women photographers worldwide - Hundred Heroines - one of 14 Americans.
She emphasizes drawing with light, photography’s indexical; light with color, underscored in process and approach, is her performative record: a visual all - or - nothing (zero). Her photographs no longer represents object-subject relations but rather the twin interplay of light and shadow, stark in black and white minimalism while freeing color itself into a kaleidoscope of abstraction.Well developed in the 20th century in — Abstract Expressionism, Minimal, Conceptual Art — Carey’s photographic pictures of nothing upend the medium's collective histories asking us now: “What is photography?” Or “Is it a photograph”?
"The discovery of my Pull in 1996 introduced Photography Degree Zero; I am the originator of this phrase; its senior user. It refers to Writing Degree Zero by Roland Barthes, which offers a critical discourse on the departure from a descriptive narrative in French avant-garde literature. In related fashion, my work represents the absence of a picture “sign” found in the tradition of landscapes, portraits and still life. Instead, my work consists of an image made without a subject, any reference to a place, person or object, collapsing and upending the mediums’s collective histories".
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Victoria and Albert Museum's photography collection
National Science and Media Museum
RPS Journal 1853-2012 online and searchable
Photographic History Research Centre, Leicester
Birkbeck History and Theory of Photography Research Centre
William Henry Fox Talbot Catalogue Raisonné
British Photography. The Hyman Collection
The Press Photo History Project Mapping the photo agencies and photographers of Fleet Street and the UK
The correspondence of William Henry Fox Talbot
Historic England Archive
UAL Photography and Photography and the Archive Research Centre
Royal Photographic Society's Historical Group
www.londonstereo.com London Stereoscopic Company / T. R. Williams
www.earlyphotography.co.uk British camera makers and companies
Fox Talbot Museum, Lacock.
National Portrait Gallery, London
http://www.freewebs.com/jb3d/
Alfred Seaman and the Photographic Convention
Frederick Scott Archer
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