James Welling: Wolfsburg

This survey of American photographer James Welling's images from the past 25 years offers the opportunity for an in-depth study of the complex and mutable priorities upon which this work builds its strength. The different series of works complement and contrast one another as a network of associations, rather than a linear chronology. For example, we see the on-going tension between the representational power of photography and its pictorial purity (or abstraction) when moving from the images of railroads to his pictures of crumpled fabric and foil imaginary landscapes. And most recently, the "Light Sources" pictures embrace a wide range of associations from the world observed or natural -- the sun shining through a thicket of trees -- to the world engineered or mediated -- a mosaic of ceiling lights. Essays by Michael Fried and Sarah Rogers focus on individual images from different series as well as varied preoccupations from the past three decades.