Spontaneity and Materiality: What Photography is in the Photography of James Welling

Given disenchantment with conceptions of photography that reduce it to trace, imprint, or index, this essay outlines an alternative. Photography is a multi-stage imaging process that implicates an event of recording information from a light image. The indexical moment is only part of the broader process. This alternative conception is motivated, and its power articulated, through a reading of selected series by James Welling. His practice explores the resources and possibilities of photography in order to express a metaphysics of the mind’s relation to its world that the new conception is well placed to articulate. The essay also grounds a much wider range of critical and historical approaches than default conceptions. © Association for Art History 2019.