Preview our Spring 2024 catalog, featuring more than 500 new books on art, photography, design, architecture, film, music and visual culture.
APERTURE
James Welling: Monograph
Edited by James Crump. Text by James Crump, Mark Godfrey, Thomas Seelig. Interview by Eva Respini.
Hugely influential among contemporary art photographers, James Welling has created beautiful and uncompromising photographs for more than 35 years. Operating in the hybrid ground between painting, sculpture and traditional photography, Welling is first and foremost a photographic practitioner enthralled with the possibilities of the medium. James Welling: Monograph 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. To date, 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, 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, Chief Curator of the Cincinnati Art Museum contributes an extensive introductory essay. Also included are text contributions by Mark Godfrey and Thomas Seelig, plus an interview with Eva Respini, Associate Curator in the Department of Photography at MoMA. James Welling has exhibited extensively both nationally and internationally. An earlier survey exhibition, James Welling: Photographs, 1974–1999, originated at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, and traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and the Baltimore Museum of Art. In 1999 he received the DG Bank-Forder Prize in Photography from the Sprengel Museum in Hannover, Germany. Solo exhibition venues include Regen Projects, Los Angeles; David Zwirner, New York; Maureen Paley, London; Galerie Nelson-Freeman, Paris; Wako Works of Art, Tokyo; Donald Young Gallery, Chicago, and Galerie Nächst St. Stephan, Vienna. Welling is professor in the UCLA Department of Art, where he has taught for more than 15 years, and a visiting professor at Princeton University.
Featured image is reproduced from James Welling: Monograph.
PRAISE AND REVIEWS
Artforum
Michael Fried
James Welling (Aperture) is a sensationally attractive book. It was published to coincide with a large survey exhibition of the artist's work from the 1970s through 2012 that opened at the Cincinnati Art Museum and traveled to the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, where I caught up with it. The main text by James Crump, is an exemplary account of Welling's career to date: It proceeds in chronological order, series by series, with unflagging intellegence and critical acumen.
What gives Monograph its special allure are the 250 technically superb illustrations in black-and-white and color, which offer a brilliant tour d'horizon of Welling's remarkably inventive, multifarious, often lyrically beautiful production. No one persuing this dazzling and substantial book could possibly doubt that Welling ranks among the foremost photographic artits in the world today.
Featured image, "Farnsworth Steps" (2006), is reproduced from Aperture's new release, James Welling: Monograph. In the published conversation with Eva Respini, Welling delivers a beautiful explanation of his changing relationship to color: "A few years ago I started teaching a color seminar. I had become interested in how we see color—the phenomenon of color as a lived experience. My 2005 Hexachromes were a direct result of wanting to show how the three color receptors in our eyes work. I did this by photographing a stationary plant, and—as shadows moved across it—I made multiple exposures on the same piece of film, using red, green, blue, cyan, magenta, and yellow filters. When the shadows did not coincide, the additive and subtractive colors were made visible, creating a rainbow effect. I went to the Glass House thinking I would do the same, but there was no wind to produce moving shadows. So, I began to put overlapping filters in front of the lens. As I worked on the Glass House, the color became more vibrant. Interestingly, I kept seeing the bright colors of the photographs in my daily experience. I would print an unnatural orange or a purple, and I would go outside and see the same colors in a shadow or in a flash in the sky, or on a car. As I became sensitized to unnatural colors, I realized that they were not unnatural—I just hadn't noticed them. Becoming attuned to color has led me to think that we actually see more color than we normally perceive. I guess in some way I'm trying to liberate color." continue to blog
FORMAT: Hbk, 9.5 x 11 in. / 256 pgs / illustrated throughout. LIST PRICE: U.S. $80.00 LIST PRICE: CANADA $95 ISBN: 9781597112093 PUBLISHER: Aperture AVAILABLE: 3/31/2013 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: No longer our product AVAILABILITY: Not Available
Published by Aperture. Edited by James Crump. Text by James Crump, Mark Godfrey, Thomas Seelig. Interview by Eva Respini.
Hugely influential among contemporary art photographers, James Welling has created beautiful and uncompromising photographs for more than 35 years. Operating in the hybrid ground between painting, sculpture and traditional photography, Welling is first and foremost a photographic practitioner enthralled with the possibilities of the medium. James Welling: Monograph 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. To date, 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, 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, Chief Curator of the Cincinnati Art Museum contributes an extensive introductory essay. Also included are text contributions by Mark Godfrey and Thomas Seelig, plus an interview with Eva Respini, Associate Curator in the Department of Photography at MoMA.
James Welling has exhibited extensively both nationally and internationally. An earlier survey exhibition, James Welling: Photographs, 1974–1999, originated at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, and traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and the Baltimore Museum of Art. In 1999 he received the DG Bank-Forder Prize in Photography from the Sprengel Museum in Hannover, Germany. Solo exhibition venues include Regen Projects, Los Angeles; David Zwirner, New York; Maureen Paley, London; Galerie Nelson-Freeman, Paris; Wako Works of Art, Tokyo; Donald Young Gallery, Chicago, and Galerie Nächst St. Stephan, Vienna. Welling is professor in the UCLA Department of Art, where he has taught for more than 15 years, and a visiting professor at Princeton University.
