James Welling

James Welling (born 1951 in Hartford, Connecticut) is a postmodern artist. He earned both a BFA and an MFA at California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California, where he studied with, among others, Dan Graham. He emerged in the 1970s as a postconceptual artist for whom photographic norms and the representational field itself were and remain contested and problematized. Welling lives and works in Los Angeles.

During his career, Welling has experimented with different photographic mediums, including Polaroids, gelatin silver prints, photograms, and digital prints.

Having studied under John Baldessari at CalArts and exhibited with Sherrie Levine at Metro Pictures, Welling began his career in the so-called Pictures Generation. His self-education in photography began in 1976 with the series Los Angeles Architecture & Portraits. In 1977 his second series, Diary/Landscape, matched the handwriting of his great-grandparents' letters with winter landscapes in Connecticut. Another well-known 2009 series by Welling is a meditation over a period of three years on Philip Johnson’s Glass House, shot in situ using colored filters. By contrast, his images of the Maison de Verre, are digitally manipulated. The rooms are lightened and brightened so that in some cases they glow unnaturally like a magazine spread. Yet another series consists of rectangles of pure color, made in the darkroom using colored filters. For his photogram series Torsos (2005–08), Welling cut screening, of the same type used for windows, to follow bodily contours and placed them on chromogenic paper before exposing them.

Welling has held various teaching positions at universities since 1995. He is currently Area Head of Photography at UCLA. In the fall of 2014, he will serve as Visiting Professor of Photography at Princeton University, where he previously held the position in 2012.

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