Courtesy David Zwirner, New York

James Welling, "#015" (2005). C-print mounted to Plexiglas, 34 x 27 in.

Courtesy David Zwirner, New York

James Welling, "Torso 9-6" (2005-08). C-print, 46 x 34 in.

James Welling Charles Burchfield Gandy Brodie Jean-Michel Basquiat Keith Haring Robert Mapplethorpe Cindy Sherman John Baldessari

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JW: Well, I waited a few years before moving to New York. I entered a scene that was already forming, thanks to people like David Salle, Barbara Bloom, Matt Mullican, Paul McMahon, and John Baldessari, whom I TA’d for at CalArts. Many of these people are being shown together at the Met this month in an exhibition called "The Pictures Generation."

JS: Actually, I see a kind of earnestness in your work that contradicts many of the ideas that were characteristic of the "Pictures" generation — specifically, the conviction that photographs are somehow insincere artifacts.

JW: Well, I’m not sure my work is completely earnest. Like a lot of my peers, I value intelligence over earnestness. My work might be somewhat different from the "Pictures" generation artists, but I think we all grappled with the need to rethink the expressive possibilities of artmaking.

JS: Maybe it’s both earnest and intelligent.

JW: Yes, that makes me think of how Michel Foucault once described Gilles Deleuze as a ventriloquist. I like that thought. I’m interested in images that I can throw different voices onto.

JS: Let’s talk about when you started to use gelatin, phyllo dough, aluminum foil. I get this feeling of deadpan formalism hiding a mad scientist at work.

JW: At the time, in late 1979, I was working in New York as a short-order cook. Trying to break out of referent-based photography, I started using things around the restaurant to make geometric, abstract images.

JS: When I first saw these images, I had no idea what I was looking at. I figured they were a nod to Bauhausian formalism, to Moholy-Nagy.

JW: Well, I never had any formal training in photography, Bauhaus or otherwise. The aluminum foil photographs really came out of a different set of interests: Mallarmé, gnosticism, fractal geometry%E2%80%A6

JS: A wild assortment of contradictory influences tugging you in various directions. And then there’s your reference to Renaissance painting, at least the drapery, with its many small folds providing this suspense about the volumes hidden underneath.

JW: Actually, I’m very interested in the Renaissance notion of the picture as a transparent window. But one of my big issues is photography’s reliance on lens-based imagesystems. My abstract photographs and photograms remove the camera and the lens to question the idea of transparency in photography. Ironically, I started out being fascinated by the camera, but most of my recent work is cameraless.

JS: When I think of you working in your darkroom, I’m reminded of that famous scene in Antonioni’s Blow Up, where the main characterenlarges his photograph to reveal the telling detail.

JW: Yes, for many years, I didn’t use an enlarger; I made contact prints. And the whole point of making a contact print is that they are so perfectly resolved that there is no ambiguity! I didn’t see Blow Up until much later, so I couldn’t call it an influence. I was, however, extremely interested in the Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination and how the film frames were enlarged and reprocessed in the pages of Life magazine.

JS: I remember discovering that issue of Life in a drawer in my house growing up. I studied those film stills. They were pretty horrifying, and yet far more engaging than any photograph I’d ever looked at, at the time.

JW: I think this was the first time the general public was exposed to electronic image processing.

JS: Can we talk about your "Flowers" series? What is your procedure to make them?

JW: I compose flowers on an 8-x-10-inch sheet of Tri-X and then print the film with colored filters behind the negative.

JS: And in the "Torsos" series, do you use the same technique but with wire screen instead of flowers?

JW: Each Torso is a piece of window screen, shaped and folded and placed onto photographic paper. The screen resembles a photographic negative in the way it breaks up light and in the way it can be printed upside down or backward. The Flowers do this too, of course, but to very different effect.