Virtual Lecture | Ellen Carey & John Reuter: Art & Technology in Polaroid & Photography

Join artist Ellen Carey and John Reuter for a virtual lecture on the current special exhibition Ellen Carey: Struck by Light.

About Ellen Carey:

Ellen Carey's experimental Polaroid practice dates from 1983, when the Polaroid Artists Support Program invited her to work at the Polaroid 20X24 Studio. There, she created her Neo-Geo Self-Portraits (1984-87) followed by her stacked installations Abstractions (1988-95). Her pioneering Pull (1996) and Rollback (1997) initiated her practice Photography Degree Zero (1996-2022), that is continued today with her latest body of Polaroid work, Crush & Pull.

Ellen Carey, a Pictures Generation contemporary and member of Buffalo’s avant-garde — Cindy Sherman and Robert Longo — upends the medium's collective histories in art and technology with abstract, minimal “picture” signs. Photography Degree Zero and Struck by Light names her twin practices, while Pictus & Writ supports her creative tripod with writing. The Royal Photographic Society (RPS) named Carey one of the top 100 women photographers worldwide - Hundred Heroines - one of 14 Americans.

She emphasizes drawing with light, photography’s indexical; light with color, underscored in process and approach, is her performative record: a visual all - or - nothing (zero). Her photographs no longer represents object-subject relations but rather the twin interplay of light and shadow, stark in black and white minimalism while freeing color itself into a kaleidoscope of abstraction. Well developed in the 20th century in Abstract Expressionism, Minimal, Conceptual Art, Carey’s photographic pictures of nothing upend the medium's collective histories asking us now: “What is photography?” Or “Is it a photograph”?

About John Reuter:

John Reuter has been a photographer since the early 1970s, majoring in Art while attending SUNY Geneseo. He continued his studies on the graduate level at the University of Iowa, receiving two master’s degrees. It was there that he began to specialize in Polaroid materials, most notably his SX-70 constructions, combining photography with painting and collage. Reuter joined Polaroid Corporation in 1978 as senior photographer and later Director of the legendary 20x24 Studio. His own work evolved through large scale Polacolor Image Transfers to digital imaging in the mid 1990’s. He has taught workshops in Photoshop, Lightroom, Polaroid materials and encaustic painting around the world. In recent years Reuter has moved into video and filmmaking and is currently working on a feature length documentary titled "Camera Ready: The Polaroid 20x24 Project".

John is currently a part time faculty member at the University of Hartford in the College of Arts and Sciences and the Hartford Art School. He teaches courses in analog and digital photography as well as cinema studies. http://johnreuter.com/blog/