Diary/Landscape

For more than thirty-five years, James Welling has explored the material and conceptual possibilities of photography. Diary/Landscape--the first mature body of work by this important contemporary artist--set the framework for his subsequent investigations of abstraction and his fascination with nineteenth- and twentieth-century New England. In July 1977, Welling began photographing a two-volume travel diary kept by his great-grandmother Elizabeth C. Dixon, as well as landscapes in southern Connecticut. In one closely cropped image, lines of tight cursive share the page with a single ivy leaf preserved in the diary. In another snowy image, a stand of leafless trees occludes the gleaming Long Island sound. In subject and form, Welling emulated the great American modernists Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, and Walker Evans--a bold move for an artist associated with radical postmodernism. At the same time, Welling's close-ups of handwriting push to the fore the postmodernist themes of copying and reproduction. A beautiful and moving meditation on family, history, memory, and place, Diary/Landscape reintroduced history and private emotion as subjects in high art, while also helping to ush