James Welling

James Welling is a photographer who lives in New York. He is a lecturer at Princeton University.

In Ourselves and the Expression of Ourselves at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, Lisa Oppenheim considers twentieth-century photographer Edward Steichen’s long fascination with flowers.

Lisa Oppenheim, Dana Desboro Glover’s Hands on Stehli Silks, Holding the “Connecticut Yankee” (detail), 2025. Three paneled paravent, 72 ¼ × 71 ¼ inches. Courtesy the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York.

Jenny Calivas’s exhibition Self-Portraits While Buried, now on view at Yancey Richardson, consists of six 50 by 40-inch black-and-white prints that Calivas made between 2019 and 2021.

Jenny Calivas, Self-Portrait While Buried #2, 2021 Gelatin silver print 50 x 40 inches. Courtesy the artist and Yancy Richardson.

In his third show at Yancey Richardson, the California photographer John Divola presents two bodies of work separated by almost fifty years: “Vandalism” (1973–75) and “Blue with Exceptions” (2019–24).

John Divola, Vandalism (74V18), 1974. Vintage gelatin silver print, paper: 14 x 11 inches, frame: 18 1/2 x 14 1/2 inches. © John Divola. Courtesy the artist and Yancey Richardson, New York.

Michael Asher (1943–2012) approached each exhibition as a unique situation, and when the show closed that was that. Nothing remained. In a sense, Asher worked more like a dancer than a traditional object-maker, and the ephemerality of his work appeared to foreclose a posthumous exhibition.

Installation view: Michael Asher, Artists Space, New York, 2024–25. Courtesy Artists Space, New York and the Michael Asher Archive, Michael Asher Foundation. Photo: Carter Seddon.

Life Dances On, Robert Frank in Dialogue, at the Museum of Modern Art, is an ambitious and courageous exhibition. Curated by Lucy Gallun, who also edited a new monograph on Frank on the occasion of this exhibition, Life Dances On highlights the photographs and film work that Robert Frank made after his epoch defining book The Americans.

Robert Frank. Sick of Goodby’s, 1978. Gelatin silver print, 21 15/16 × 12 11/16 inches. Courtesy the Museum of Modern Art, New York. © 2024 The June Leaf and Robert Frank Foundation.

Old Growth, Mitch Epstein’s new exhibition at Yancey Richardson, showcases the artist’s recent photographs of very old trees.

Mitch Epstein, Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest, California, 2022. Archival pigment print, 72 x 58 inches. Courtesy the artist and Yancey Richardson.
Dawn Kim and Phil Chang’s concurrent exhibitions at Penumbra could not be more dissimilar: color versus black and white; social portraits versus idea-based work; intimate, representational images versus monochrome prints that reflect on their own making. These obvious differences hide what unites the work, as both artists are committed to a photography that is direct and honest.
Dawn Kim, Between debates, Cambridge, Massachussetts, 2023. Ink jet on Hahnemuhle, 15 x 12 inches, edition: 5 + 2AP. Courtesy Dawn Kim.
From the mid 1960s into the 2000s, this German husband-and-wife team produced austere sets of serial black and white photographs depicting utilitarian structures: water towers, steel plants, grain elevators, wood frame houses, gas tanks, mining buildings. The Bechers are celebrated for their single-minded devotion to these unadorned industrial subjects, and the lunar module dovetails perfectly with their established interests.
Bernd & Hilla Becher, Grain Elevators, 1977-91. 16 gelatin silver prints, each: 11 7/8 x 15 ¾ inches, overall: 74 3/8 x 90 1/8 inches. Signed by Max Becher and estate stamped. Courtesy the artist and Paula Cooper Gallery. Photo: Steven Probert.
Abstract Flash: Unseen Andrew Wyeth greets the viewer with a 1965 quotation by the artist: “My struggle is to preserve that abstract flash—like something you caught out of the corner of your eye.” Conceived and curated by Karen Baumgartner, the show follows Wyeth’s dedication to this “abstract flash” in sixty watercolors painted between 1939 and 1996. The show, drawn entirely from the trove of over seven thousand Wyeth paintings and drawings in the new Andrew and Betsy Wyeth Collection, is divided between the Brandywine Museum of Art in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, and the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, Maine.
Andrew Wyeth, Untitled, 1948. Watercolor on paper, 21.5 x 29 5/8 inches. Collection of the Wyeth Foundation for American Art. © 2023 Wyeth Foundation for American Art/Artists Rights Society (ARS) New York.
For his recent show at the Cristin Tierney Gallery, Victor Burgin installed a single work, Photopath (1967–69). Last seen in New York in the 1971 Guggenheim International, this pioneering site-specific photographic installation returned, like a brilliant comet from a distant galaxy.
Installation view: Victor Burgin: Photopath, Cristin Tierney Gallery, New York, 2023. Courtesy the Artist and Cristin Tierney Gallery. Photo: Elisabeth Bernstein.
In mid-July, a beautiful, monographic exhibition of the photographs of Bernd and Hilla Becher opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The show is accompanied by an impeccable publication, printed by Trifolio srl with essays by Jeff L. Rosenheim (the curator of the exhibition), Virginia Heckert, Gabriele Conrath-Scholl, and Lucy Sante. The catalogue concludes with an illuminating conversation between Rosenheim and the artist Max Becher about his parents’ life and work.
Bernd and Hilla Becher, Blast Furnaces, 1969–93. Gelatin silver prints, each 15 15/16 × 12 3/8 inches. The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. © Estate Bernd & Hilla Becher, represented by Max Becher.
Irwin’s show at Pace offers viewers new sensory experiences. Seven intriguing “Unlight” wall reliefs occupy the two street level galleries. Each relief is assembled from up to two dozen tightly spaced six-foot fluorescent light fixtures fastened to the wall.
Installation view: Robert Irwin: New Work, Pace, New York, 2022. Courtesy Pace Gallery.
As I studied at the portraits, I imagined the show through a series of musical metaphors. The CERN images are symphonic in scale.
Thomas Struth, ALICE, CERN, Saint Genis-Pouilly 2019, 2019. inkjet print, 106 3/8 x 90 1/2 inches. Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery. © Thomas Struth.
Kuo’s title, Mercury and Salt, references two of the compounds central to alchemy, and with this invocation of alchemy Kuo suggests an analogical connection with photography. Here mercury corresponds to the silver nitrate molecules in photographic paper and salt corresponds to the sulfates that fix the image. If the goal of alchemy is to transmute dross matter to a “higher” state, Kuo’s aim in Mercury and Salt is to transform dross photography into painting.
Antonia Kuo, Milk of Sulfur, 2022. Unique chemical painting on light-sensitive silver gelatin paper mounted on aluminum in welded aluminum frame, 70 7/8 x 56 1/8 x 2 inches. © Antonia Kuo. Courtesy the artist and CHART. Photo: Elisabeth Bernstein.

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