J. Seeley - Art & Art History Department

Chair, Art and Art History

Professor of Art

email:	jseeley@wesleyan.edu
mailing address:	Art and Art History Department
courses taught:	ARST451 - 01
areas of expertise:	In the early 1990s I began running out of ideas. Over the years I had photographed many subjects, from rock stars to insects. I had worked with about every type of camera that was made including video cameras and color copy machines. I had many years of experience using ten different printing processes. My interest in printing photographs in ink was still strong but the successful mix of subject, idea and technique fell into rapid decline as I experimented my way into middle age. I was losing my confidence as fast as I was losing my hair. I never did stop working, but I was no longer making prints that anyone seemed to like. Initially anti-digital, I made a cross two strips of Tri X film and hung it over my darkroom door to ward off the digital menace. Arlene Dubanevich, my wife, made it her personal mission to push me toward digital imaging. She sat with me as I complained my way through the dreaded Photoshop 2 program tutorials. I trudged on but it wasn't until I started using a flatbed scanner as a camera and printing those images on an inkjet printer that I suddenly realized that the technology I had spent a career looking for was digital! Photographs could be captured electronically and rendered in color ink. My reluctant venture into this world of pixels refreshed my vision and awakened a new aesthetic. I am now on relatively good terms with my computer. The aroma of fixer is not drawing me back into the darkroom. My wife of thirty years died tragically around the time of 9/11. Her death was followed immediately by the loss of two other close family members. My new work, my manic compulsion to make prints, kept me from stepping over the edge into a pit of depression. Only now, at sixty, have I fully realized the power of photography, the power of art. For me, it became a road out of the darkroom, and out of the darkness. - J.Seeley
research interests:	Best known for the three editions of his book High Contrast, J. Seeley's images have appeared in numerous U.S. and European Publications, including Camera, Zoom, Graphics, Photographis Annual, American Photographer, Atlantic Monthly, U&lc, The New York Times. His photographs have also been featured in a number of published collections of photographs, as well as most college photography textbooks. His work has been exhibited widely and is represented in many collections including the Museum of Modern Art, the High Museum, International Museum of Photography at the Eastman House, University of Iowa Art Museum, Colorado State University, Davison Art Center, and the Kresgee Collection. He has received two Connecticut Commission for the Arts grants and collaborated on a third. J.Seeley is a Professor of Art and has taught at Wesleyan since 1973.
office hours:	Fall 09 Wednesday and Thursday By appointment Davison Art Center (over Art Library)
lab url:	http://www.wesleyan.edu/art/seeleyphoto1.html">