The Melancholy Process, History of Photography

By now it’s a cliche to note that all photographs are, to one degree or another, about death. By the time you look at the image chemically fixed on a piece of paper, whatever object, beam of light or fleeting moment passed before the camera’s lens is long since gone. Every photograph is in part a trace, a memento mori, which paradoxically contributes to the construction of our way of seeing and remembering.

James Welling makes photographs that suggest death, but--oddly--it’s the death of photography itself. In his work we see the specter of photographic mortality that has arisen in the face of the digital juggernaut of the last few decades. His pictures from the last 25 years, surveyed in an exhibition that opened Sunday at the Museum of Contemporary Art, are thoughtful, stolid and often vaguely melancholic. Without direct quotation they evoke important moments in photography’s past, as well as basic principles of photographic process, such as the generative function of light.

For 500 years Western perception has been shaped and guided by what can be seen through ground-glass lenses. It began with the illusions of one-point perspective that were mastered by painters in the 15th century, and it exploded with the 1839 invention of a way to fix ghostly images in a photographic print. By contrast, digital images, woven together from bits of electronic impulse, need no lens. Welling’s photographs, made on the cusp of the new digital revolution, record the passing of a lens-based world.

Tellingly, the earliest work in the show is a 1974 videotape, made by positioning a stationary video camera up close in front of a spent fireplace. Essentially a still-life made from moving images, its funereal subject is “Ashes.”

Born in Hartford, Conn., in 1951, Welling studied at CalArts in the 1970s and spent the 1980s and early 1990s living and working in New York. Each place offered something notable. New England provided an important source of subject matter, CalArts provided grounding in the strategic bent of Conceptual art and New York was one place where avant-garde art was focusing on camera work.

In 1995 Welling returned to Los Angeles to teach at UCLA. The exhibition, organized by the Wexner Center for the Arts at Ohio State University, assembles 139 photographs drawn from 10 series. By emphasizing serial work, in which any single picture functions as part of something larger, Welling gestures toward context as an important feature of his art.

One series (1977-86) chronicles in close-up several handwritten pages in a honeymoon diary kept by the artist’s great-great-grandparents; these pictures of penmanship are interspersed with snowy landscapes. Another series (1988-94) focuses on the blunt, thick surfaces in the great Romanesque Revival architecture of Boston’s Henry Hobson Richardson, who is generally regarded as the first internationally important American designer.

Picturing language and buildings is obviously a metaphor for the construction of meaning. Yet, dates seem to be equally important here. Richardson was born in 1838, while the honeymoon of Welling’s ancestors began in 1840. It can’t be coincidence that these two dates bracket the momentous year when Daguerre (in France) and Talbot (in England) went public with their competitive experiments in the new medium that came to be called photography. Partly, Welling’s work shows us what was happening when photography was first changing the world. He frames history in specifically photographic terms.

Welling’s photographs often contain veiled or submerged references to the photographic past. Look at the series “Light Sources” (1992-98), and amid the obvious images of lamps, fluorescent tubes and various reflective surfaces (water, snow) is a picture of a cloudy sky, which nods to Steiglitz and his “Equivalents.” Another picture of a horse on a cobbled street is initially puzzling, despite the sunlight softly reflected off his prominent rump--until, suddenly, the subject makes you think of Muybridge and his famous early motion-studies of a galloping horse.

Ten pictures of the machinery inside a French lace-making factory conjure the unseen place of manufacture in some of photography’s earliest pictures, such as Hippolyte Bayard’s famous cyanotype image of a lace glove. Their sheer elegance differentiates them from other possible sources, such as Lewis Hine’s journalistic images of child labor in American cotton mills.

Welling’s diary series, which mixes pages of handwritten text with wintry landscapes, recalls Paul Strand’s “Time in New England,” where landscapes are mingled with 17th century writing. Indeed, Strand’s intensely lyrical work seems an unusually important precedent for Welling. Sometimes the connection comes from the subject; for instance, Strand made some of the first compelling pictures of precision machines. More generally, his emphasis on aesthetic qualities of luxurious surface, rich tonal value and precise design echoes throughout Welling’s career.

Strand-style chiaroscuro, or the manipulation of light emerging from shadow as a means to produce dramatic illusions of planar depth, even seems to be the subject of one of Welling’s most curious series: lush, softly lit pictures of velvet drapery, sprinkled with translucent flakes of filo dough.

It also informs the 18 dryly witty, silver gelatin photographs of crumpled aluminum foil that, in the early 1980s, first brought attention to Welling’s work. The crinkled foils are silvery surfaces pictured on the silvered surface of a photograph. Their dappled light and shadow resonate against Strand’s classic close-ups of the elemental natural surfaces of glacial Nova Scotia rock.

Most recently, Welling has revived the old practice of making photograms by placing pieces of cut paper or cardboard directly on the surface of photographic paper, then exposing it to light. His photograms then become templates for digital prints. The result is compositions of wide, pitch-black lines on white surfaces (or, if you prefer, bright white geometric shapes scattered across black surfaces), which look something like photographic reproductions of Franz Kline paintings. They are photographs as pure design, made with light.

This thorough retrospective reveals a body of work that is very easy to respect, but about which it’s difficult to feel much excitement. By emphasizing aesthetics and embracing tradition in an elegiac sort of way, Welling’s photographs are a welcome assertion that art’s social function is partly found in its expression of continuity, rather than in the mere display of virtue that tends to dominate socially minded art. Yet, their aesthetic dimension can also be repetitive and overly familiar. That deadens rather than enlivens perceptual experience.

* Museum of Contemporary Art, 250 S. Grand Ave., L.A., (213) 626-6222, through Aug. 26. Closed Monday.