Diary/Landscape

Book excerpt: For more than 35 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. A beautiful and moving meditation on family, history, memory, and place, the work reintroduced history and private emotion as subjects in high art, while also helping to usher in the centrality of photography and theoretical questions about originality that mark the epochal Pictures Generation.