Diary/Landscape

James Welling was born in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1951 and studied art at the Wadsworth Atheneum, the West Hartford Art League, Carnegie Mellon University, and the California Institute of the Arts, where he received his MFA in 1974. His work has been the subject of survey exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Fotomuseum Winterthur; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and the Cincinnati Art Museum. His books include James Welling / The Mind on Fire, James Welling: Monograph, Glass House, and Light Sources. In 2014, he received the International Center for Photography's 2014 Infinity Award in Art and he received the 1999 DG BANK-Förderpreis Fotografie from the Sprengel Museum in Hannover. He is professor in the Department of Art at University of California, Los Angeles.

James Welling s "Diary/Landscape "is a formative series of 140 black-and-white photographs by this important contemporary artist. For over thirty-five years, James Welling has explored the possibilities of photography as a mediumits material qualities and its conceptual problems. As a professor in the UCLA Department of Art (and visiting professor at Princeton), he has also been an influential teacher. Dating to 1977-86, "Diary/Landscape" marks the fruition of Welling s earliest experiments with photography. It is also a beautiful and moving photographic document in its own right, a meditation on family history, memory, and place. The series full title is "Diary of Elizabeth and James Dixon (1840-41)/Connecticut Landscapes." It alternates photographs of pages from a diary that Welling s great-great grandparents kept on their honeymoon and haunting New England landscapes and still lives. As James Crump writes in a new catalog of Welling s work, The pressed leaves, flowers, and flora and the impeccable India ink penmanship [of the diary] possess a melancholic edge that Welling intensifies by pairing these images with flinty winter landscapes he made near his parents home in Guilford, Connecticut. The handwritten texts in these images bear striking resemblance to sketches by Andrew Wyethamong the artists move beloved by Welling. Includes a text about the series by James Welling and an essay on Welling by the Art Institute of Chicago s photography curator, Matthew Witkovsky."