Mary Ellen Bartley

Since 2004, Mary Ellen Bartley has explored the tactile and formal qualities of the printed book - both its potential for abstraction and its position as an object of material culture. Bartley’s work concerns itself with geometry and pure form; painterly in style, her photos also invite curiosity about the layered histories of the books themselves. Her photographs provide a reflective response, a respite, from a noisy and chaotic world, a particularly potent act in this increasingly digital age.

Below is a selection of Bartley’s series ranging from her minimalist studio arrangements of anonymous books chosen for their specific physical qualities, to projects realized in unique libraries and archives where she responds to collections and their habitats.

“This series is about muting – pressing a mute button and creating a quiet, circumscribed project. I work with books, containers, and symbols of stories, information, knowledge, and meaning, but I deliberately hide any clues to the booksʼ contents, rendering them anonymous and wordless…The calm palette [of] fog grays and tooth colored whites further tranquillizes the clamor of narratives, characters, and action that must be contained within their pages.”

READING GREY GARDENS

Reading Grey Gardens examines the personal library of the Beale family, relatives of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and subjects of the landmark Maysles brothers’ documentary Grey Gardens. Granted access before the house was sold, Bartley captured the books as a botanist might, preserving them and creating a typology that reveals the rich detail of their physicality. Distressed by prolonged exposure to sea air and bearing the scars of the riches-to-rags trajectory of the Bouvier-Beales, Bartley both archived and reinvented the collection of books at the famed East Hampton estate.