Introduction
Found Moments Transformed is not only an essential body of work for Alice Wells, but a body of work that is requisite in understanding the path Wells took in her photographic practice. This distinct body of work, begun in the winter of 1969, gained her recognition and displayed her individual voice in a collective and collaborative era that was challenging the traditions of photography. The process involved printing from found glass plate negatives from the early twentieth century, solarizing areas, and blocking details on figures such as faces and hands, thus challenging the notion of the fine photographic print and the truth of the image.
This selection of works from the Alice Wells archive housed in the Visual Studies Workshop Research Center shows an array of prints that were made preceding and alongside the creation of Found Moments Transformed. The self-consciousness of the photographer as maker and participant in the creation of image is inherent in these works by Wells. Through collage, multiple exposures, hand coloring, reformatting and combining sources such as commercial print and television, Wells creates a visual dialogue for understanding the photographic conventions she and her community of friends were challenging. As Robert Fichter, a close friend of Wells who worked alongside her in the late 1960s, has stated, "It is clear to everyone today that, as I have been saying for the last thirty years, photography is just another mark-making method."
Wells’s use of multiple frames and multiple exposures questions the photographic image as a representation of a real moment in time. In the era in which Wells was working, photography’s possibilities as both a documentary device as well as a printmaking and image collecting tool were being recognized. Wells’s use of the same figure multiple times in a single print helps to develop her viewpoint that photography was not a simple recorder of reality but another tool and medium for her art-making practice, much like a paintbrush or a pencil.
About Alice Wells
Self Portrait, Alice Wells
Alice Wells worked as an administrator and assistant curator for Nathan Lyons at George Eastman House from 1962 to 1969, and continued on as Lyons’s assistant at the newly formed Visual Studies Workshop, proceeding events that remain as legendary and mysterious as her personal life. Wells was born on November 26, 1927, in Erie, Pennsylvania, and studied at Pennsylvania State University. She picked up a camera in 1959, and worked tirelessly for fifteen years in Rochester, exploring and imitating many of her contemporaries until she found her own voice in the photographic medium. Wells died in New Mexico in 1987 and her archive of prints and negatives was donated to the Visual Studies Workshop by her fourth husband, Roman Attenberger. RY
For more information on this artist, including VSW's holdings, please click here.
About the Exhibition
Movement: Selections from the First Decade of the Visual Studies Workshop is an online exhibition showcasing an assortment of over 100 pieces from working artists affiliated with the Visual Studies Workshop in the 1970s. These selected artists demonstrate the early years of a revolutionary new institution. [Read More]
