For Ellen Wallenstein making art is a daily habit. There’s such vitality and exuberance in her work and her words, that upon viewing it you understand that this is not a chore but a necessary act of creation, of expression, and in its wisdom, of meditation. Her work is generous, disarming, witty, honest, and completely beautiful. We were so grateful for a chance to discuss her art and her life.

Magpies: I love the idea of making art every day. My motto has always been “The more you create the more you create.” I’m curious about how this works in your life. Do you set yourself goals?

Do you work on larger projects, or something simple like a sketch or a journal entry, or some mix of both? 

Ellen Wallenstein: I make art every day, or every sunny day these days. For the last three years, it’s been double-sided cloth cyanotypes, subject matter reflecting my state of mind and circumstance. I still take photographs but they no longer feel so important to me. I’m working in the studio. The cyanotypes use a photographic process, but they’re not about seeing. They are more related to my collage work, where I’m laying things down on paper and making unique objects from the ideas that come to me. More unconscious than deliberate. It’s very mysterious but at the same time very simple, dependent upon light, time, and chemistry. I’m currently making them into prayer flags, for friends.  

Do you find some work grounding and calming, and some inspiring (or a mix of both!)

Working is always grounding for me. Keeps me curious, productive, and sane.  

Do you go through fallow periods, and do you have a method to get yourself out of them, or does that even feel necessary?

It depends on circumstances, time, and life situations. I’m not teaching anymore so I have more time to make art, but it seems the days go faster now. I can’t always be productive, but I can show up in my studio and hope the muses show up.  

Woven and Striped Collages

In your biography you say that you “make” photographs, and somehow that sparked a chain of interesting ideas in my mind: The difference between taking something and making something. One letter! Taking evokes a little bit of thievery, stealing a moment in time or a small slice of someone’s life. Making maybe involves a broader involvement…concept, composition, execution, reflection.  Can you talk about your process of taking or making photographs, and the way that’s changed over the years?

Photographs are by their nature “taken” — noticed, recorded, archived. Looked at as evidence, proof, information, history. Framing, focal length, depth of field, shutter speed, are part of the “taking.” Looking, editing, sequencing, and attaching meaning (if there is any) are part of “making.” It’s really just a matter of semantics: what matters is the image. Once I began using a digital camera, I started to shoot in color. It’s not that it changed the way that I shoot, necessarily, but it opened me up to a deeper experience, using color as another layer of meaning. That was life-changing for my work, certainly. Before that, I’d done everything on film in black and white. I shoot in a documentary style, mostly on the street and on the sly. Over the years, the equipment has changed, moving from heavy film cameras to lightweight cameras (and phones!) that are easy to carry. 

Much of your photography seems to get to the very root of the purpose of photography—the act of preserving something, or saving it from the inevitable passage of time.  Particularly in your series Opus for Anne and Respecting My Elders, there’s an almost reverent aspect to the remembering, and a sense of hope mingled with the more sober feelings the photographs evoke. Can you talk about photography—or art in general—as a tool for preserving, expressing or sharing memories?

For me, photographs are always about time, always about the past, as soon as they are made.  So they are about preserving life, or an illusion thereof — people, places, parties, events, celebrations, and even death. If you are lucky enough to have a family album you can see what your ancestors looked like at a specific time in their lives, peering through time at you. 

Ideas and projects come when you are ready for them. They find you. The fact that I was 50 years old when I started Opus for Anne, and 60 when I published “Respecting My Elders” is significant – I would not have been interested in those subjects before. Anne was 85, the same age my father would have been, and she sort of looked like my grandmother. She lived for way longer than anyone expected, which gave me time to really become a friend, and to make photographs at every visit. It was very special. 

Opus for Anne

“Respecting My Elders” arose from that experience, though it was much more public in nature because of the fame of the individuals I photographed. I made portraits of creative artists over 80 years old, in their homes and studios. The book included information about and advice from each of them about staying creative all one’s life. Sadly (but not surprisingly), ten years later almost all of them are deceased, so I’m thankful that I was able to venerate that generation when I did.

“Long ago it must be / I have a photograph 

Preserve your memories / They’re all that’s left you.”

Simon & Garfunkel’s “Bookends” with that haunting tune and sorrowful lyrics reminds me that I was just sixteen years old when I first heard that album, and that “How terribly strange to be seventy” now applies to me. It’s not terrible, but it is strange. 

Respecting My Elders: Age and the Creative Spirit (Click on the image and the “i” to read the wisdom and advice)

I’m particularly interested in your two series of diptychs. I love the idea that we, as humans, make connections between things and weave those connections together to make stories. What was your inspiration for the series? What was the process of choosing/editing the photographs like? There’s something so pleasing about the simple idea of two perfect squares becoming a rectangle. Can you talk about the choices you made when you began the series?

I taught book-making for many years – making physical structures in different forms – editing, sequencing, housing a collection or telling a story of some sort. Something I am really interested in is the pagination of images, the sequence of the series. The way you read pictures from left to right and what happens when they are put together.  

Artist Book, “The Blind Leading the Blind”

I’ve always loved the square format- starting with a Rolleiflex in grad school. It’s a very different shape to fill compared with any kind of rectangle. I made a rule for myself when I started making the diptychs that each photo had to work really well on its own, and better when paired. That meant noting the form and the frame of each photo, how the edges go together, the content of each and both. They either dissolve into or play off each other, visually and conceptually. When it manages to be both it’s super-exciting to me.

Choosing the pairs is mostly intuitive. I have a good visual memory and I can remember specific photographs, especially if they have been recently archived. I also have a fairly wry sense of humor and that’s a factor in some of this work. There are some visual puns and amusing titles, especially in the museum/gallery/street art pictures. They are not neutral.

In one of my favorite diptychs, Lonely Muse/ Lonely Guard, Metropolitan Museum, I first paired them because of the color, and the fact that I made them in the same place. The woman in the painting seems to be holding open the wall of the other gallery, like a portal through time. That she is a depiction of Joan of Arc (painted by Jules Bastien-Lepage, 1879) is a serendipitous after-fact.

Another favorite (this diptych gets big “likes” anytime it has been posted, for obvious reasons) is Chelsea Wall / Astor Place Subway. It pairs a street art painting of a Dutch woman, worn away and re-drawn, with a topless woman sitting on a subway bench. The goofy grin on the painting is the same as the smirks of the men I saw wandering around outside the frame of my photograph.

In White Curtains /X  (from the East Harlem work) both buildings share white paint either as sign or symbol, signifying both the past and the future. The real prize for me here is the center, where the trees meld and the two sets of bricks line up, exactly the same size.

Do you find yourself looking for connections as you set out with your camera? The actors who work on Jacques Tati films said they began to see the world through his eyes, and notice all the odd and amusing moments of everyday life. I imagine working on these series would have the same effect, and you’d start to see “interesting, mysterious or amusing” connections all about you.

In short, No. I just go and see what I see. Shoot first and look later. It requires a lot of practice to make a good photograph. You have to see it and shoot it, literally in a fraction of a second. You have to be in the right place at the right time with perfect timing, framing, and exposure. And not be thinking too hard, if at all. 

It’s after downloading them (it used to be B&W contact sheets, looked at with a loupe) and perusing them that I can even see the photos individually. Editing them down and pairing them is the challenging part. That’s done after the fact of the photograph. The connections are not conscious or even clear at first; it helps to sit on them for a while. Looking back at my work for this interview, I’m noticing connections and details I hadn’t seen when I first put them together. 

Many of your diptychs combine an image from a museum with an image of people today living their ordinary lives. It’s a beautiful reminder that we, today, are part of a rich and ongoing history. And also that the people in the old paintings and sculptures, as well as the people who captured their images, were human, with the same thoughts and cares and dreams that we have. 

When visiting a museum and looking at art, we’re in the present, in the presence of the past. That in itself is phenomenal and magical. Standing before those old paintings in real space and time is an extraordinary experience (especially if there is no glass in front of it). A photograph of it can’t do that for you, it can only reveal the fact of it. 

In Ingres,/Commes de Garcons, Metropolitan, the Princesse de Broglie is definitely looking back at us with deadpan bemusement at the outfit of the museum-goer to her right. Good God/Bad Dog, another pair from the Met, is another cross-century pairing that I found amusing when I titled it. No Hand / Bird in the Hand, from the Cloisters is another example.

How does a knowledge of history and specifically art history come into play in your work?

My knowledge of art history is tantamount to my understanding and use of photography, in the art diptychs especially. My favorite period was the Early Netherlandish painters, so my palette is influenced by those colors and that light. This is especially evident in the “Opus for Anne” work. 

Follow-up question: what artists, photographers, filmmakers, or writers do you admire? 

What do you seek out when you go to a museum?

What I seek in museums are my old friends. I like paintings by the Spanish Baroque artists, especially Velazquez; Manet and Degas and other Impressionists; and the Early Netherlandish artists. I remember being knocked out by Breugel’s Harvesters on a field trip in elementary school; that postcard was my first art purchase.

In photography I like historical images, going back to the beginning of photography and through the 20th century. There are too many to name, but I’ll mention some greats: Arbus, Atget, Atkins, Avedon, Callahan, Evans, Frank, Friedlander, Gedney, Gibson, Lange, Levitt, Penn (Irving the photographer and his brother Arthur the film director), Perkis, Smith, Sudek, VanderZee, Winograd……. I also love historical archives, family archives and vernacular photographs.

Of your two series, it seems that the East Harlem Diptychs were made in a specific place during a specific period of time. They function as a portrait of a part of the city and the people who live in it. The New York City Diptychs are wider-ranging in terms of time and space. Did this difference in the limitations on each series affect their production or the spirit of them, or the message they convey?

The East Harlem photographs were made while I was an Artist-in-Residence at the Covello Center on East 109th Street, for two periods of three months. In the artist studio I was making collages, but on the street I was making photographs every day. They were taken in a very limited and prescribed area around the 110th Street subway station. The neighborhood was in the early stages of gentrification and there were many boarded-up structures amid the older buildings and the high-rise condos. Those first diptychs were easily constructed pairs that commented on my exploration of a mostly Hispanic neighborhood, with its bright colors, religious symbols and signs and murals. I shot a lot of street art, which led to the later work. 

East Harlem Diptychs

I had no end in mind when I started shooting in museums and galleries. Visiting these places was part of my usual life routine. It was just a fun thing for me to do. I think the art diptychs are a little bit more sophisticated than the previous ones, or maybe nuanced is a better word. It might have to do with the palette, which is more muted and hushed, compared with the East Harlem work. They are less documentary and more pointedly amusing, perhaps because I was not a stranger to those places. 

I love the small snatches of text (and the images that go with them) in the diptychs. Signs, graffiti, billboards, posters, all seem to create a new level of meaning, and a new way we can “read” the images and find connections. The images seem to speak to us and beg us for attention. Can you talk a little about the use of words and letters in your work? 

Photo history is full of signage: for example Berenice Abbott’s New York photographs of storefronts with their lists and prices. Walker Evans was obsessed with hand-painted signs. Lee Friedlander”s “Letters from the People” use his collected alphabet from around the country.  Duane Michals’ early works contain stories written on and around the mat of the pictures. My very favorite photograph of lettering from history is the chalked graffiti “Button to Secret Passage – Press” in Helen Levitt’s photograph, which I see as a metaphor for the picture-taking process itself. 

I enjoy looking at graffiti on walls, chalk on the streets,  letters on store windows, business signs, posters.  I’m also interested in incised letters on walls and commercial signage. In F.I.T. Dress / Homeless Woman, 8th Street the word “photo” in white on the window behind the homeless woman is both a description and a comment on the protocols of street-shooting. On the Upper East Side, the exterior business sign Psychic Advisor with its bright electric bulb, just begged to be paired with the Sphinx in the Metropolitan Museum. 

I also love the glimpses of nature, whether real or artificial – small patches of grass, city trees, pigeons. It’s almost like a window through the bricks and pavement to the soul of the city and the people who live in it. This is also reflected in the light, whether internal and artificial or external and more natural. It’s very evocative in a way that’s hard to describe. Somehow the natural spaces and elements make us more aware of the shadows and reflections and dust of the urban elements, and make us think about the lives of the people who live there. As a longtime city-dweller, do you feel that you have a special vision or appreciation for small pockets of green and growing things?

As a child, the green I was most aware of was the trimmed boxwood bushes that were planted around the front and side of my apartment building. I noticed them every day. That might have sparked an early interest in the pockets of greenery that I later photographed around the city. I grew up in Washington Heights and lived within walking distance of Fort Tryon and the Cloisters. It’s a beautiful park with so much space and greenery — the heather gardens, the play lawns, the amazing scenic views of the Hudson River. The altitude of the area (it’s the highest place above sea level in the city) makes it seem bigger than it is, somehow. 

The parks are an important reminder of how many people are served (and saved) by small pieces of nature in public spaces. How necessary neighborhood parks are to one’s mental health. Ditto to city street trees, many of which appear in my photographs. 

How did teaching others make you view your own work differently? Has your method or focus changed since you’ve stopped teaching?

Everything, including my art-making has changed since I stopped teaching, which coincided with the onset of the Covid pandemic and my own personal, life-changing circumstances. I retired officially in 2022, but I had stopped teaching a year before that, online. 

I’m aware of how corny this sounds,  but it was an honor to serve on those faculties and teach for so many years. I was very lucky to be able to sustain two adjunct positions for a long time. I had amazing colleagues and students, and access to good libraries, museums, galleries, the art world. An education for myself as well.

As a teacher, there are a lot of roles to play — historian, critic, performer, mentor.  Setting the example of being an artist and making work. Trying to be kind and open, to create an atmosphere of trust. Not always easy and not always possible. Every class was different, every student is different, and I never knew what I was going to see at critiques. At least, I hoped for that.

Teaching was always a blast — very invigorating, inspiring, challenging. Working with college students kept me young and informed. There was a lot to keep up with, technically and educationally, and then there was also the art culture of NYC that was constantly changing. Now that I’m retired from teaching, I find that I miss my students, peers and colleagues. And the city.

“I am a photographer, artist and retired professor of art. I make photographs, drawings, collages, books and boxes. Making art is a daily habit: a meditation, a centering.

My interest in photography was sparked in childhood, when I looked at family albums. I am interested in how photographs reflect history – a record in time of how people presented their life to the camera. Evidence of the past always viewed in the present.

I started photographing in high school in the late 1960s.  I studied art history in college because I loved looking at art, having grown up in New York City, visiting museums. Bruegel’s “Harvesters” at the Metropolitan is always a revelation to me.

It was in graduate school at Pratt Institute that I understood I was an artist, and a teacher. I began an academic career at the UT Austin in 1978, returning to NYC in 1986 to teach at the School of Visual Arts. In 2001 I started teaching at Pratt Institute. I retired from both schools in 2022.

I show my work at the Carter Burden Gallery in NYC , It can also be seen online at NYArtistsCircle.com and Visura.co.” -Ellen Wallenstein

See more of Wallenstein’s work on her website ellenwallenstein.com, and on Instagram @ellen.wallenstein.