Ellen Carey: Photography Degree Zero
Ellen Carey, Crush & Pull & Rollback, 2021. Polaroid 20x24 positives. Collection of the artist, courtesy of JHB Gallery (NY, NY) and Galerie Miranda, Paris (FR)
Written by Trevor Bishai
The Polaroid 20 X 24 Land Camera is one of the most storied photographic cameras in history. Standing over five feet tall and weighing over two hundred pounds, this behemoth might seem like no sibling to the creators of small instant prints normally associated with the word “Polaroid.” But the camera uses exactly the same chemical process as its peel-apart film counterparts, and, true to its name, the 20 X 24 is able to produce a dye-diffusion print measuring twenty by twenty-four inches in just under three minutes.
Produced by the Polaroid Corporation for a very short period between 1976 and 1978, the 20 X 24 was the brainchild of founder Edwin H. Land, who collaborated with artists such as Ansel Adams to create the technology for its instant development capabilities. Only six such cameras were ever produced, but its popularity among artists elevated it to almost canonical status in the photography world. It has been used extensively by the likes of Chuck Close, Dawoud Bey, Andy Warhol, and Robert Rauschenberg, but perhaps the most well-known operator of the camera was Elsa Dorfman, the late Beat-generation photographer who invited celebrities, friends, and family alike to her Cambridge, Massachusetts studio to sit in front of its vast bellows. Dorfman, who passed away just over a year ago, was a champion of the 20 X 24 and produced thousands of portraits in her thirty-plus-year stint working with the camera.
Ellen Carey, Crush & Pull, 2021. Polaroid 20 X 24. Collection of the artist, courtesy of JHB Gallery (NY, NY) and Galerie Miranda, Paris (FR)
In the long aftermath of the 2001 bankruptcy of the Polaroid Corporation and the waning popularity of film photography in general, the future of the 20 X 24 has been in constant jeopardy. Luckily, thanks to artist and former Polaroid executive John Reuter, artists are still able to use one of the few working 20 X 24s left today. Reuter purchased all the remaining 20 X 24 film stock after the corporation’s bankruptcy, and continues to produce the chemicals necessary for its development. In spite of the awareness that they are working with a finite resource, artists devoted to the 20 X 24 continue to work with it, often in the most unconventional of ways.
One of these artists is Ellen Carey. A graduate of the Kansas City Art Institute and the State University of New York at Buffalo, Carey brushed elbows with artists such as Cindy Sherman and Charles Clough in the 1970s before receiving a sponsorship from the Polaroid Corporation in 1983 to begin working with the 20 X 24. Using the camera for close to forty years, Carey’s practice with it has traced a long path from representation towards complete abstraction.
Ellen Carey, Crush & Pull, 2019. Polaroid 20x24 in Positive. Collection of the artist, courtesy of JHB Gallery (NY, NY) and Galerie Miranda, Paris (FR)
Carey’s early work with the 20 X 24 consisted primarily of portraiture, which was common with many of its users, as the camera’s large image area and vivid color palette enticed those interested in rendering a sitter’s affect in immense detail. In the 1980s and ‘90s Carey began applying paint and collage to her 20 X 24 prints, not long before she abandoned representational work altogether. In the mid-1990s, Carey entered into a two-decade long preoccupation with producing abstract prints through creative manipulation of the 20 X 24’s photographic process, a project she has titled Photography Degree Zero.
Plenty of photographers create abstract work, but few of them do so absent a photographic subject, which Carey has striven to do for decades. Photography Degree Zero refers to the title of Roland Barthes’ 1953 text Writing Degree Zero, in which he expresses praise for writers who transcend the rigid structure of language, and in doing so, attempt to create their own form of speech that is no longer alienated from reality. Cursorily put, in linguistics, the signifier (the word) and the signified (what the word refers to) assume more distance from each other the more a literary discourse develops over time. While Barthes is here concerned with literature, Carey saw the potential for a parallel idea in photography. Photography is a system of signs, inherently representational, presumed to provide a document of something outside of itself, i.e., the image signifies something that existed in front of the lens. The photographic image as a sign is no doubt removed from the object it attempts to represent. In order to achieve a form of image-making that is less alienated from reality than the dominant practice of photography, Carey looked towards the photographic process and began creating images without a referent at all.
Ellen Carey, Crush & Pull & Rollback, 2021. Polaroid 20x24 positives. Collection of the artist, courtesy of JHB Gallery (NY, NY) and Galerie Miranda, Paris (FR)
Ellen Carey, Crush & Pull & Flare, 2019. Polaroid 20x24 in copy. Collection of the artist, courtesy of JHB Gallery (NY, NY) and Galerie Miranda, Paris (FR)
What followed was Carey’s first Pull, the name given to her series that strove to abandon the photographic subject altogether. One might think it is impossible to create a photograph of nothing unless you leave the lens cap on and release the shutter, perhaps. To fully abandon the idea of a real-world subject, Carey looked towards the Polaroid color process itself. Now possibly her signature aesthetic, a Pull is a document of the Polaroid’s dyes being pulled out of the camera’s rollers as the print moves downwards out of the camera. This results in a somewhat consistent, yet always unique oval shape etched on the bottom of the print. Occasionally, Carey will expose the negative to a white or tinted sheet, resulting in a horizontal line above the oval which denotes the image area of the Polaroid. While the area that is able to be exposed is only twenty by twenty-four inches, the remnants of the ‘pulling’ remain seen beyond this area. In this way, Carey’s prints don’t refer to anything besides the process itself, which can be seen as a closing of the gap between image and reality that normally arises in representational art.
Ellen Carey, Crush & Ding, 2019. Polaroid 20x24, Installation View. Collection of the artist, courtesy of JHB Gallery (NY, NY) and Galerie Miranda, Paris (FR)
Faithful to the artistic process, what proceeds from Carey’s Pulls are further practices that engage intimately with the Polaroid’s image-making process. Once a Pull has been completed, Carey might roll the film up and feed it back into the camera to expose it a few more times, creating a Rollback. On each Rollback, we can see several reiterations of the dye-staining process, and can witness Carey’s artful placement of each new exposure on the film sheet. Carey saw the potential for more extensive, physical engagement with the film itself beyond the idea of multiple exposures, though. To create a Crush, one of the latest iterations of her Photography Degree Zero series, Carey takes a roll of film to the darkroom where she unrolls it and proceeds to crush and crumple the sheet, before rolling it back up and preparing it for exposure. Once the film is exposed to either white or tinted light and developed, the creases in the sheet create both an intricate and abstract network of lines and variations in color. In addition, while producing a Crush, Carey might bring a small penlight into the darkroom with her and use it to draw patterns on the negative, which eventually appear as evidence of ‘light painting’ after development. In each Crush and Pull, the evidence of Carey’s manipulations on 20 X 24 negative create striking abstract designs cast in the quintessential rich and saturated Polaroid tones, designs one would scarcely believe were created with a camera.
Ellen Carey, Crush & Pull, 2021. Polaroid 20x24. Collection of the artist, courtesy of JHB Gallery (NY, NY) and Galerie Miranda, Paris (FR)
Photography has long been seen as an art form which can provide answers and tell the truth about a moment in time. Once the subject-object binary is broken down, however,we witness a different, much more mysterious truth. Her images aren’t of anything; there is no subject besides the process itself.This creates a sort of photographic aporia—the state of wonder that arises when our logic and interpretation reach an impasse. As questions of ‘what it means’ fall by the wayside, Carey’s relentless experimentation with the 20 X 24 reminds us how the two fundamental components of photography—light and color—can produce the most beauty in their rawest forms.
