Constructivist Portrait

Ellen Carey is an American artist known for conceptual photography that explores non-traditional approaches involving process, exposure and paper. Her work has ranged from painted and multiple-exposure, Polaroid 20 x 24, Neo-Geo self-portraits beginning in the late 1970s to cameraless, abstract photograms and minimal Polaroid images from the 1990s onward, which critics compare to color-field painting. Los Angeles Times critic Leah Ollman describes her photography as "inventive, physically involving, process-oriented work" and her photograms as "performative sculptures enacted in the gestational space of the darkroom," whose pure hues, shadows and color shifts deliver "optical buzz and conceptual bang." New York Times critic William Zimmer wrote that her work "aspires to be nothing less than a reinvention, or at least a reconsideration, of the roots or the essence of photography."