Pulls is quite a unique work by Ellen Carey who is a known abstract photographer. The shapes in this piece don’t really seem to represent any real-world object or being. Instead it seems to give off an energy similar to that of a Rorschach test image. The psychological nature of humans is to find something representational or familiar so that they may relate to the image or feel comfortable looking at it.

This is subverted so that instead viewers minds may be persuaded into seeing something that is not necessarily there. On first glance it looks like each of these black shapes with the white circles in the middle begin to portray what feels like human expression. The second image (from the left) looks as if though it is upset and is in general worse off than the other shapes. The other shapes as a result look more content. The sequence of these images also communicates a passage of time, it feels as though that these four figures are not four separate figures, but instead is an object being captured in different stages of its existence and the final one being the most different could be considered to be in a state of decay.

This is what makes abstraction so interesting because humans desire familiarity and abstract art wishes to throw
familiarity to the wind. Artists often have to deny their human instincts to create something representational and instead create blindly or at least create with no detailed plan in order to achieve abstractions. This usually leads to the viewer seeing these abstractions and assigning representational ideas to works that otherwise had none to begin with.

Header image:

Ellen Carey, Pulls, 1998. Photograph Courtesy of Author.

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Sources

“Ellen Carey Photography Artist Statement.” Ellen Carey Photography. Accessed May 10, 2019. http://www.ellencareyphotography.com/artist-statement.