James Welling: Monograph

Text by Mark Godfrey and Thomas Seelig. Interview by Eva Respini

Published to accompany a career-spanning survey at the Cincinnati Museum of Art (February – May 2013), James Welling: Monograph synthesizes Welling’s various photographic series, which range from abstract photograms to documentary-style portrayals of the New England landscape. The exhibition traveled to the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles (through January 2014).

Operating in the hybrid ground between painting, sculpture, and traditional photography for the past 35 years, Welling is first and foremost a photographic practitioner enthralled with the possibilities of the medium. This book provides the most thorough presentation of the artist’s work to date.

Since the mid-1970s, Welling’s work has explored realism and transparency, abstraction and representation, optics and description, personal and cultural memory, and the material and chemical nature of photography. The artist has been the subject of numerous catalogues addressing his more than 25 bodies of work, yet no previous book has attempted to link these works and examine the primary threads that run through them all. Sumptuously produced and created in close collaboration with the artist, this volume presents a large selection of recent series, from 2000 through to the present, interspersed with important early and iconic works made in the preceding decades.

James Crump, former Chief Curator of the Cincinnati Art Museum who organized the exhibition, contributes an extensive introductory essay. Also included are text contributions by Mark Godfrey, Curator, Tate Modern and Thomas Seelig, Curator, Fotomuseum Winterthur, plus an interview with Eva Respini, Associate Curator, Department of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art.

Read an excerpt from the book: a conversation between Welling and by Respini.