Diary/Landscape

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."