Information and discussion on all aspects of British photographic history
Time: May 5, 2022 to June 25, 2022
Location: Paris, France
City/Town: Paris, France
Event Type: solo, exhibition, dates, at, galerie, miranda, paris, fr.
Organized By: Ellen Carey & Miranda Salt
Latest Activity: Jan 10, 2022
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Let There Be Light: The Black Swans of Ellen Carey opens as a visual vade mecum at Galerie Miranda in 2022. Carey’s handbook guides us through photography’s nearly two centuries’ arc of light, photogram, colour, and Polaroid as seen in her practices, Photography Degree Zero and Struck by Light.
For the 21st century, for Paris, The City of Light, for us, Ellen Carey brings her arc into the future with Crush & Pull with Rollbacks & Penlights, a completely new 21st century photo-object from Polaroid’s monumental negative, which allows Carey, its ‘camera operator’, to reposition “light drawing” anew. It highlights Polaroid and its huge 20 X 24 camera as one of the medium’s 20th century game changers.
Carey visually consults Talbot, Daguerre, and Anna Atkins, the tripod of 19th century game changers: Talbot’s negative-to-positive duality of the photogram-as-image is doubled while Daguerre is mirrored in the glossy polish of Polaroid’s pristine surface and crisp picture; Talbot’s soft-focus, non-color compositions in blurry outlines sees light’s ‘shadow’ while Prussian blue sees colour-as-light transformed by Anna Atkins’ cyanotype images.
Each one used light and light-sensitive processes to create their images —all unique pictures, all-in-one totalities originating visual impact for which the gestalt is c’est. The ‘Black Swan’ theory sees unexpected events become game changers in this, the global world, as it is, now. Carey’s performance in the ‘black box’ of the darkroom — folding, crushing, creasing, and nothing seen until it is finished —abounds with affinities to the Surrealist drawing game of “exquisite corpse”.
When light becomes visible the object speaks. Ellen Carey’s object says craquelure, parabola, hue, abstract, process, minimal, Polaroid, photogram, black swans, light, beauty, color, wonder, invention, innovation. It says, Crush & Pull with Rollbacks & Penlights.
ELLEN CAREY
Crush & Pull with Rollbacks & Penlights:
Polaroid 20 X 24 Color Positive (3)
and Negative (3) = 6 total prints
60”H x 22”W (each) or 20”H x 66”W (suite)
150 x 56 cm (each) or 150 x 168 cm (suite)
Image copyright@ 2021
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
© 2023 Created by Michael Pritchard.
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