Ellen Carey (b. NYC, NY - USA), a Pictures Generation contemporary and member of Buffalo’s avant-garde with Cindy Sherman and Robert Longo, upends the medium's collective histories in lens-based art, photography, and technology with her abstract, minimal “picture” signs. Ellen Carey is a university educator, independent scholar, guest curator, experimental photographer, and lens-based artist. The Royal Photographic Society (RPS) named Carey one of the top 100 women photographers worldwide, 1 of 14 Americans, under their Hundred Heroines platform, now. separate organization (www.hundredheroines.org) Her unique and experimental photo-objects have been seen in over 70 solo plus hundreds of group exhibits, reproduced in books, brochures and other printed matter; she lectures widely; in-person or Zoom. She collaborated with dunhill of London (2021) followed by two solo exhibits - “Light Struck” - Fox Talbot Museum, Lacock (England); the home of the pioneering William Henry Fox Talbot, who discovered paper negative, i.e. photogram. "Light Struck" saw 220,000 visitors with millions of uploads, it paralleled her other solo as“Struck by Light” - New Britain Museum of Art, that saw 30,000 visitors (www.nbmaa.org); both extended a full (2023-24); lecture/workshop at foam museum (www.foam.org) with John Reuter, Director of Polaroid 20 X 24 Studio (www.0X24Studio.com) with a visit to Polaroid headquarters and factory in Amsterdam, where also worked on their "big camera" known the world over as Polaroid 20 X 24 and made several of her signature "Pulls"(www.polaroid.org). In Paris, her work in two group exhibitions at BnF plus a solo “Let There Be Light: The Black Swans of Ellen Carey” at Galerie Miranda (2022); solo booth at Jayne H. Baum, Paris PHOTO (2018), group exhibition, Seterah Gallery (2023). Photography Degree Zero (1996-2024) in Polaroid 20 X 24 and Struck by Light (1988-2026) in Photogram name her dual practices while Pictus & Writ, the third leg of her creative tripod, sees published essays on her discovery in a Man Ray self-portrait "Space Writings, Sol LeWitt for his MASS MoCA retrospective, a research project on women and color photography starting with Anna Atkins plus her own work. She is Associate Professor of Photography-Hartford Art School, University of Hartford-Connecticut. She emphasizes photography’s indexical "drawing with light" partnering light with color. Her innovative, technical knowledge and burgeoning imagination dare viewers to engage with the arc of time beginning with the earliest memory of light and shadow up to the present of momentary rainbows. Her performative record is a visual all or nothing, her ‘zero’. Her photographs no longer represent object-subject relations but rather the twin interplay of light and shadow, stark in black and white minimalism and freeing color itself into a kaleidoscope of abstraction that create new “picture signs”. At the dawn of photography, one finds the photogram. The word ‘photography’ means “drawing with light”, its Greek roots - phōs for light, graphis for drawing. Originally, the photo-object was named ‘photogenic drawing’ or ‘sun pictures’ - later - ‘photogram’. Ellen, my Catholic birth name, in: Irish, Celtic and Gaelic, means “light” or “bringer of light”, a prescient gift from my parents, as my DNA intertwines around fate and destiny as a “light traveller” and “camera operator” an early term for photographers. Light’s immateriality challenges its makers today, analog versus digital, double our challenges. All my projects begin with questions. Here I ask: “What is a 21st century photograph?” sees my answer in partnering 19th century photogram with 20th century Polaroid’s instant technology. A door opens: “What if I use other processes too?”. As a conceptual point-of-departure, I employ a parlour game of Dada and Surrealist movements - exquisite corpse - starting in the pitch black dark, with nothing. Then I fold the color paper, imaging as I touch - crush, fold - what? Re-purposing this game towards new paths of creativity in the subconscious; I hide-and-seek; hiding in the dark, seeking an image. Links my photographic experiments in color with process, minimalism and abstraction, light and its variations, often with zero exposure, linking my twin practices in Polaroid 20 X 24 as Photography Degree Zero (1996-2024) with my series "Crush & Pull" (2018-2024) and in Photogram as Struck by Light (1988 - 2026) in my series "Dings & Shadows" (2010-2026) as I now turn to other palettes - black and white - and other processes - cliche-verre - while I continue to keep the photo-object "in focus". References to the dawn of photography, all “light travelers” forms a ”linked ring” that adds new picture “signs” to our global picture culture in my work, as a mirror to the phrase "See What Develops…!" from Polaroid, to which I add - "Shall We?" - open a window, let light in. Ellen Carey www.ellencareyphotography.com Wikipedia