The Brooklyn Rail

When James Welling gets deeply involved in a project, he sees the subjects he’s interested in everywhere. His current body of work, Thought Objects, emphasizes textured surfaces. Some of his subjects include flowers, Brutalist architecture, a blue door in Paris, a sculpture table in Guilford, but his photographs do much more than convey subject matter, they open out into fields of metaphor and analogy. On the occasion of his exhibition at David Zwirner, art historian Robert Slifkin met Welling at the gallery for a discussion that touches on the artist’s early education, his hypersensitivity to constructed images, and the different ways he’s processing images to achieve the sensuous aesthetic qualities he desires.

Robert Slifkin (Rail): The title of your current show is Thought Objects. Where does that term come from?

James Welling: Thought Objects was the title of a 1987 magazine of 125 photographers and artists’ images that Glenn Branca and Barbara Ess published. When I borrowed their title for this series of photographs, I was looking for something inclusive of all the things I was doing. My “Thought Objects” are like philosopher’s stones, photographs to think about, and decipher.

Rail: I like that idea. And I think it touches upon the way that your work often uses photography to engage with other artistic media, such as painting, printmaking, architecture, and dance. In other words, your photographs are thinking about these other creative practices. You were originally trained as a painter at Carnegie Mellon, right?

Welling: Yes. Second generation Abstract Expressionist painter Gandy Brodie was my freshman drawing teacher.

Rail: And you studied dance in college as well.

Welling: With Jeanne Beaman at the University of Pittsburgh.

Rail: And then as a student at CalArts with John Baldessari, who was an artist who used photography, but was not an “art photographer.”

Welling: Another big influence at CalArts was Wolfgang Stoerchle, a performance artist who made beautiful videos.

Rail: And so your relationship with photography came obliquely.

Welling: Yeah, and this touches on the perennial question: am I a photographer or an artist?

Rail: Well, Jim, are you a photographer or an artist?

Welling: It’s context dependent. With photographers I’m generally seen as an artist. With artists I’m a photographer. So, the designation photographer-slash-artist fluctuates, and I like the instability.

I started out as a watercolorist. Edward Hopper, Andrew Wyeth, and Charles Burchfield were my high school heroes. Then I started reading Artforum and saw the PBS documentaries on Frank Stella and Robert Rauschenberg. When I got to Carnegie Mellon, I was all set to continue progressing through contemporary art, but I was detoured and permanently affected by Gandy Brodie, who challenged me to look at Rembrandt, Henri Matisse, Paul Klee, Chaïm Soutine, Georges Rouault, and Mark Rothko.

Rail: What year was this?

Welling: 1969.

Rail: So by that moment, the idea of painting in an Abstract Expressionist style or summoning someone like Rothko seemed against the currents of contemporary art.

Welling: In October 1969, Gandy took the class to New York and we visited Mark Rothko’s studio. The class hauled black-on-black canvases out of his painting racks and arranged them in the studio for a discussion with Rothko. That was an amazing experience!

Rail: By the time you got to CalArts had you more or less stopped painting?

Welling: I made a few paintings and some sculpture and performance work at CalArts. But video really got to me and would, a few years later, become my gateway to photography. My earliest videos explored technical issues in the medium. I made a work titled Second Video in 1972 that was a sequence of short demonstrations of the quirks and artifacts that were unique to early black-and-white video equipment, things like static produced by rough edits, or abrupt changes in white balance.

My experience with a large video camera on a tripod seemed to segue naturally into work with an equally large 4 by 5 view camera in 1976. And, after a twenty year gap, those early experiences with video would influence my work with scanners and digital cameras.

Rail: So in a way video is a very early form of digital photography, avant la lettre.

Welling: Exactly. The first thing with video is that you learn the proper exposure to take stills off the monitor—1/30th of a second at f5.6 with Tri-X. Stills of my video works were the first black-and-white prints I made. In a sense, digital photographs are just sophisticated stills off the video monitor.

Rail: That’s really interesting, because I think it speaks to the kind of transmedial engagement we were just talking about. Maybe this also gets us to some of the major themes in this body of work that you’re showing right now, the way that when you photograph architecture, you are treating it in a similar way to that TV screen in the sense that it’s a preexisting image that you are then mediating through a camera. So there’s a kind of collaboration between these two media. In that regard I think it’s interesting that you have selected as subjects for some of the new works brutalist buildings by Marcel Breuer and Paul Rudolph (i.e. Orange County Government Center [2015/2023]) whose surfaces have their own sort of matrices or bands that suggest a kind of pixelated grain like a TV monitor.

Welling: What amazed me when I’d visit Breuer’s Whitney Museum in the 1970s was the uncanny bas-relief textures left by the wood forms that Breuer used to shape his concrete walls.

Rail: I imagine certain photo historians would be quick to say that that is a kind of para-photographic indexical trace, that the imprint of the wood grain on the cement is no different than the imprint of photons on the sensitized plates. So there’s a certain affinity between the photograph and architectural style, which I think happens in the image in the show of the Orange County Government Center—photographing itself, this impossible image where the reflection of the building appears in its own windows.

Welling: That’s a bit of a trick photo because there is only one Rudolph building. The “golden hour” reflection is a late afternoon shot of the same façade that was stripped in by my assistant John Sisley.

Rail: The other thing is the way that Rudolph’s architecture, with its surfaces and roughly textured ornamental bands invite—or produce—a very complex play of shadow and light that seems particularly photogenic, especially in terms of the processes that you’ve developed in this show.

Welling: The surfaces of Brutalist buildings are well known to be, as Rudolph put it, corrugated. If you look very closely at the emulsion side of any piece of film you will see that it has a velvety texture, which is actually microscopic roughness; in other words, film has corrugations.

Rail: Right. So how do you convey texture in what is essentially a two dimensional and rather non-grainy format? That seems to be one of the underlying themes of this body of work.

Welling: My interest in texture started in a very roundabout way. Fourteen months ago, I was in a two-person show with Thomas Ruff at the Kunsthalle Bielefeld. The curator, Christina Végh, hung huge Ruff photographs next to my relatively small images, a big Ruff star photograph next to one of my small aluminum foil prints. The show looked great because we each held our own on the wall. When I said goodbye to Ruff at the train station, he asked me, “Are you ever going to make a large photograph?”

Rail: Perhaps a challenge?

Welling: A challenge, yes. When I began final preparations for Thought Objects six months ago, I decided to take him up and print the work large. But I ran into problems because, after I tried the usual methods to up-res my images, I wasn’t happy with the results.

Rail: Which, if I’m correct, typically have to do with inserting what we’d call kind of visual noise. The idea is that you’re stretching the picture. It’s losing information, so in order to keep the picture coherent, you have to kind of fill in the gaps with blurred noise.

Welling: Right. If you are not an expert at adding noise to your files, however, the added digital grain or “noise” can look like mushy oatmeal. Upscaling is a mysterious art; everyone has their own proprietary “tricks.” Very quickly I tired of this secret society sort of thing, so I made my own, very simple, digital up-resing tools in Photoshop.

Rail: What is the technical term you’ve developed to describe this process?

Welling: I created something I call “equidensity processing” that both up-reses and sharpens my images. I was inspired by the “Waterhouse Effect,” an analog film development technique that chemically produces a positive and negative image on the same sheet of film. My variation is that I digitally make a positive and a negative of the same subject on two “virtual sheets of film.” I misalign my virtual film and this adds noise to the image and also sharpens it.

Rail: So when you say sharpening, this is typically done in order to heighten contour lines.

Welling: Yes. Every mechanically reproduced image goes through some stage of sharpening before publication. In the analog environment this meant minutely misaligning positives and negatives. Now it’s done digitally to mimic analog sharpening. Sharpening increases edge definition which the human visual system is built to detect.

Rail: And when this occurs in your large-scale prints, it produces this uncanny bas-relief dimensionality that gives the work a very powerful sense of texture, which is very different from sharpening. So what was developed as a technique to make a more legible image now becomes a means of making an image that is notably tactile, haptic rather than optical.

Welling: When I saw the bas-relief effect as I up-resed my photographs, I decided to lean in on the digital “crunchiness” I was getting. But don’t forget that in polite photography circles “over sharpening” is a no-no because no one wants it visible. In my photos I want the viewer to see my over-sharpening, my Van Gogh-like big brush strokes of grain.

Rail: Yeah, but as you know there’s a longstanding modernist reading of artists like Van Gogh and Pollock that foregrounds the overt declaration of the means of production, which in painting is often manifested in the visible brushstroke. And according to this reading, revealing how the work is produced engenders an experience of authenticity that one can’t find in other realms of life. But as you’re describing your working process, it’s very obvious that for you, these kinds of technical, self-reflexive moves are invoked for more sensuous ends. I think about how in these works, in the spaces of misregistration, there’s this kind of psychedelic halation effect that occurs because you’re working in color. Maybe if the image was in black and white, it would just appear as a strong line, but because you’re working in color, it produces these very vibrant and strange color effects right at those passages that seem to be doing more than merely revealing the means of production.

Welling: My father worked for an offset printing company and I can remember sitting next to him as he pointed out misregistration errors on press sheets. He trained me to look at printed material with a critical eye. Thought Objects brings this hypersensitivity to the construction of digital images.

Apropos of revealing the means of production, since 2018 I’ve been working on an ongoing lithography project. Periodically I would clean my brayers on sheets of newsprint. At some point I saw that some of these unintentional “offprints” were interesting abstract paintings. I photographed a few and merged one of these accidental paintings with a color digital photograph of an Aalto structure (Hansaviertel Apartment Building [2017/2022]) in Berlin. The roller marks almost obliterate the building, but you can still make out stairs in the middle of the photograph. So, the work records the subject, the Aalto, and the disturbance the painting creates. In Tea Pavilion (2017/2022) I took a blue offprint and created a Rauschenberg-esque composition on a photograph of a nineteenth-century Schinkel building in Potsdam. Prouts Neck near Winslow Homer’s Studio (2015/2023) is probably the most dramatic example of these mash ups. You look “through” the accidental painting on newsprint toward a seascape. The offprint resembles a stormy seascape laid across an otherwise placid image.

Rail: By juxtaposing these oily scraps of paper to the photograph, you’re taking a kind of accidental form of brushstrokes to invest a photograph with the same painterly dynamism that one might associate with one of Homer’s seascapes. So there’s a lot of things going on in this work that have to do with not just the kind of technical challenge of making a large print, but, I would argue, informing the photographic image with something beyond its referential denotation, in part by bringing in chance and digital mediation.

Welling: I’m doing this because I find it very exciting to introduce an element of accident or chance across these otherwise beautiful “subjects.”

Another way to think about these accidents is that they function as “masks” that I lay over the underlying photographs. In photography masks are used for color correction, but generally they stay invisible.

Rail: Photography often is an art of miniaturization in that most pictures are not life size. But in the Prouts Neck image, the rocks are miniaturized and the offprint pigment is scaled up. It creates an uncanny affinity between rock and paint, which is emphasized by the noise that occurs in the rendering of the rocks.

Welling: The rocks are strongly striated because of their geological formation and this horizontal rock “grain” is exaggerated and amplified by the abstract offprint overlaid on it. The parts of the offprint over dark rocks bleach the underlying tones lighter. Against the bright blue sky, the offprint turns pinkish gray.

Rail: Again, there’s a kind of scrambling that’s occurring between miniaturized rocks and enlarged offset pigment, which I would say produces the irrational and sensuous effects. But it also forges an analogy: that rocks are like paint. Is this because rocks are literally the source of pigments?

Welling: UV prints use pigments, not dyes, and pigments come from minerals—think of the “earth colors,” or Ultramarine blue that derives from rocks.

Rail: That’s quite profound. This speaks to how you turn a photograph, which is often understood to be a literal document, into something that is metaphorical, that is analogical. This is really interesting. I never thought about this in terms of your, tell me the name of the technique again?

Welling: Equidensity.

Rail: Equidensity. It’s a literal form of doubling with its misregistration. And that doubling automatically and literally makes the photograph more than what it is. And by doing that, it opens it up to interpretation, to analogy, to metaphor—all the things that relate to the art of Rothko’s and Gandy Brodie’s generation.

Welling: The texture of Gandy Brodie’s paintings floored me when I first saw them. Gandy would paint the same image on top of itself to produce thick textures. Prouts Neck uses equidensity processing to create a bas-relief texture.

Rail: And that gets us into the collage work where these techniques of masking and doubling become quite overt. What strikes me about all the collage works is that again, there’s something fundamentally photographic about them in the way that they can join multiple moments of time. In Orange County Government Center two different light moments are “collaged.” And this channels an aspect of looking at photography that Roland Barthes and others have written about, which is this sense of how photographs always connect multiple moments of time: the moment of their taking, but then the almost infinite possible moment of their beholding. And I feel that with the collage you’re literally conjoining multiple moments in time. And this relates to something you said in our last conversation that really stuck with me, which is that you want to recreate the sensuous experience of standing in front of a photograph.

Welling: I’m not quite sure what I meant by that!

Rail: To me, it suggests the kind of experience of looking at something with a certain intensity and focus and with a sensitivity to one’s embodied presence. One of the things that’s always been fascinating to me about photography is that it doesn’t just document what’s in front of the camera, but it also is a document of the operator behind the camera, and this produces a double indexicality that makes every photograph unintentionally autobiographical and even expressive in the way that it seems able to pictorially objectify a subjective experience. And I think color photography does this even more explicitly. There’s something about color photography that seems capable of summoning a sense of the there-ness. When you look at the images of the sculpture table in Guilford, you feel the sun, the heat, the feel of the air. Was it summer?

Welling: Spring, late March.

Rail: But you can really sense the sun. And maybe this gets to what is going on in the paradox of the Orange County Government Center photographing itself, capturing two moments in time, two types of sunlight really. And there’s something about the collage works that are both registering the effects of the sun at a particular moment in time and scrambling it at the same time.

Welling: Most of the source photographs were made many years before I printed them. I took the source image for The Royal Salt-Works of Arc et Senans (1988/2023) thirty four years ago and “processed” it into a “thought object” last year. This photograph, like the two I made in Guilford, was over-sharpened to intensify textures. I guess the question is: why I am over-sharpening? It goes back to that comment you mention, of the sensuous experience of standing in front of a photograph. Over-sharpening amps up and intensifies that experience of looking.

Rail: Exactly. And again, that just speaks to the halation effects that appear on the edges of the forms, that there’s something about these works that are both using the technology—the automatic, impassive processes of photography—to produce irrational, sensuous ends.

Welling: Some of the photographs, such as The Royal Salt-Works or Paris Door (2017/2023), develop colored edges from misregistration. Those are the ones my father would have called me out on!

Rail: It makes me think of the way people sometimes speak about Cézanne’s paintings. There’s a certain kind of misregistration that characterizes his facture, which has been understood to be a painterly means of recreating embodied perception. I wonder if one of the reasons you were drawn to making larger prints in this series is to produce an image at the same scale as the human body, so there is a much more embodied encounter with the picture. This gets back to recreating that sensuous experience, which is slightly strange, because many photographs are looked at in books, or on screens, where the viewer is often sitting. Standing in front of a photograph entails in some ways a large photograph hung on a wall. I think this also speaks to your interest in making photographs that can rival any painting or sculpture.

Welling: Yes, right.

Rail: And does that ambition also entail the desire to produce a picture that contains that possibility of sensuous effect? Thinking about your photos of buildings by Breuer and Rudolph and even your photograph of the Salt Works with their rough, corrugated surfaces, in some ways we’re talking about texture. There’s a kind of literal feeling that this sort of architecture can engender. It can scrape your skin! So I guess I’m wondering if this literal tactile feeling has anything to do with that other, more categorically aesthetic kind of feeling, what Alexander Bigman has recently written about as the “acts of feeling” that were surprisingly pervasive in the practices of many members of your generation where expressive effects were generated through an almost melodramatic performativity, as in Cindy Sherman’s “Untitled Film Stills,” for instance.

Welling: In my 1980 aluminum foils I photographed textured surfaces and scintillations of light, and both seemed “essential” to photography. Concurrently I listened to a lot of No Wave music that I felt my 4 by 5 aluminum foil series shared something with. In his essay Bigman makes this connection explicit.

Rail: And there’s something about the model of music, and maybe in particular, kind of the No Wave music of Branca or Sonic Youth, where it’s at once ironic and cool, and yet undeniably powerful, affective and maybe even expressive.

Welling: Yeah, well, rock music, or for that matter all music, is about emotion.

Rail: It’s romantic. What has always struck me as a fundamental characteristic of rock is the way that it can be both purely performative and knowingly ironic and yet full of feeling—that someone like Lou Reed could be at once putting you on and totally meaning it at the same time. And this seems to me to suggest a compelling analogy with what is going on in the works of the so-called Pictures Generation, at once acknowledging that a picture is a constructed representation and a means of expression. The pictures of the workbench in Guilford seem to convey this dynamic for me because they’re such offhand and yet inspired scenes of creation.

Welling: I was very taken by the outdoor sculpture spaces at this small art center in southern Connecticut. It was a brilliant day and I photographed in a trance. These two tables, one covered with a tarp, the other with work in progress, really moved me—what incredible surfaces they had. When I processed the images, the textures and moiré patterns became electric.

Rail: But that’s what I’m trying to get at, that you look at those pictures and I think they have to be seen in person at that scale to get that effect. And there’s a kind of sense through this strange, psychedelic halation at the corners, through the intense light, that there’s kind of energy in that space, which for me has to do with the fact that this is a site of artistic creation. And I feel that part of the power of these works is how they invite viewers to try to re-experience what had happened at that site, the creative acts, including your own. I think about Mathew Brady setting up his camera on Civil War battlefields days after the event, but somehow, the technology of the camera is able to pick up some kind of energy that happened there. It’s not metaphysics because it’s light—the idea that somehow the camera is this machine for capturing energy.

Welling: Around the idea of capturing energy, I’ve discovered that digitization of visual images uses the same processes and tools as sound digitization. In essence, visual digital tools are modeled on audio tools. You could say that my photographic prints amplify the volume of the scene photographed, as in your Brady example. And volume is also a spatial term.

Rail: What you’re saying seems so important. This kind of amplification that you’re talking about seems like a means of reinvesting that kind of energy into the work so that it produces an effect that most images, whether photographs or any other media, don’t contain, or which remains imperceptible. And maybe photography is the crucial medium for such a project, because photography is still the place where we have affective encounters with images, whether it’s movies that make us cry, or photographs on our phones of loved ones, or, for that matter, pornography. These are pictures that actually have affective agency, that produce feelings, which one might argue is radically unlike a lot of contemporary art. So that idea of using photography to reinvigorate modernism, which is a concept I know your work has often been aligned with, seems true enough, but maybe it’s not so much using photography to reinvent modernism as it is using photography to reinvigorate art’s capacity to engender feeling.

Welling: That’s a great observation. Over the past two years, I worked with a loose set of photographic subjects—architecture, landscape, flowers—that I had been photographing with no final product in sight. They were simply images that I was drawn to. No focused series, very much like the mindset of my “Light Sources,” an encyclopedia of things I liked photographing. What is different from “Light Sources” was that in Thought Objects I varied how I processed each group of subjects for different effects.

Rail: A similar sort of doubling and amplification seems to be going on in Paris Door.

Welling: I liked the white spackle on the blue wood before the painters finished the job. I photographed the door in January 2017 and never thought of printing it until two months ago. It’s a weird situation—you photograph something and six years later you print it in a way you could never have pre-visualized.

Rail: The work is positing some kind of affinity between door painting and printmaking. And like the Guilford work table, it can be seen as documenting a creative practice, albeit a practical rather than purely aesthetic form of painting. It’s both high art and what we might call vernacular practices, which in crucial ways aligns with the medium of photography which exists relatively unproblematically in both realms.

Another creative practice you’ve been exploring in the last ten years or so, is writing. Particularly writing not only art criticism but also some catalogue essays, and writing, especially for the Rail.

Welling: I started writing on photography in 2019 when I collaborated with my wife Jane Weinstock on an essay about Jeff Wall and textiles. We looked at the history of fabric in his work, on the relationship between textile dyes and color photographic dyes, and used textiles to examine his engagement with feminist theory.

After the Wall essay, I realized I wanted to write about photography from the point of view of a photographer. Most civilians have little idea how a photograph is made. With that in mind, I reviewed Antonia Kuo’s extraordinary chemigram paintings/photographs. I wrote a long piece about the Bechers where I highlighted the joy I could see in their work—in taking photographs on location, in the developing and printing in the darkroom and in arranging their grids of images for exhibit. This summer I wrote a catalogue essay about a dozen photographers for a show at the Santa Barbara Art Museum. With each photographer I looked at one technical decision they made—the choice of lenses, the type of camera, or camera location, decisions about print size, mounting and presentation—that was crucial for the work. I wanted to address these photographic determinants that are often overlooked because photography, like modern music, is very technical.

Rail: I think that speaks to this larger issue of the kind of modernist attention to process that is a fundamental component to your work. But, again, never a means to an end. Rather it’s to produce something that is new or never seen before. Maybe with the criticism it’s a way to elucidate the complexity of processes that most viewers probably are not familiar with.

Welling: If all you do is talk about how the subject in front of the camera makes you feel and not how it does that on some sort of basic technical level—lens, point of view, print decisions—then you’re not addressing the photograph. Recently I have become alarmed as photographic processes, such as color negative film and c-prints, disappear along with the very specific decisions the photographers made using these materials. I’m not mourning the materials themselves but the practical decisions that accompany them. All the techniques I use in Thought Objects come from my experience in analog photography. I enjoy seeing how traces of analog lives on atavistically in digital photography.

Rail: I love the idea of going through this current show and thinking about them as a form of archaeological photography.

Welling: Interestingly archaeologists use aerial photographs made with raking light at sunrise or sunset to detect the almost invisible traces of ancient foundations. “Raking light” is another way of describing equidensity processing.

Rail: Don’t they also use high contrast film for increasing the legibility of inscriptions?

Welling: Yes. In the 1970s Agfa created an equidensity film called Agfacontour for scientific photography.

Rail: That seems like another instance where your work is in dialogue with other modes of photography and art more generally—and notably what could be called creative practices that are not typically recognized within art historical institutions.

Welling: I love archaeological and architectural photography, as genres. My Rudolph Orange County Building is an homage to architectural photography’s “golden hour.” One of the constants in my work has been a sensitivity to the grammar of photographic genres—railroad photography, architectural photography, dance photography. I love these specific pictorial grammars.

Rail: You’ve used the term ventriloquism to describe your engagement with these genres, which maybe is another way of describing that.

Welling: Ventriloquizing through the grammars of different photographies.

Rail: Ventriloquizing seems to me very different than that term often invoked around the Pictures Generation, appropriation, which has a kind of ironic edge. And I don’t think that’s what’s going on in your work. It’s not about taking something out of its context to reveal its constructedness. Your work, I think, conveys a much more generous attitude towards its subject.

And it makes me think about when I saw you last in Brooklyn, and we were walking out of the photo lab, and you saw the shadows of some construction tape on the sidewalk and you took out your camera and photographed it. I saw the enthusiasm that happens at the moment of taking that might not be evident in the original digital file, or the negative, but maybe can be amplified in post-production or printing so as to recapture that initial moment of perception.

Welling: Whenever I’m deeply involved in a project, I see the subjects I’m photographing all around me. With Glass House I saw intense flashes of color in printed matter, in movies, in afterimages. When I made Choreograph, psychedelic imagery kept popping up. And with Thought Objects bright, textured surfaces are everywhere.