BIO
Tim Greyhavens

Tim Greyhavens in an independent writer, researcher, and photographer based in Seattle. He integrates his work to explore transitions in photography from the 19th to the 21st centuries. In 2017 he created The Curtis Census, an independent effort to advance knowledge about Edward S. Curtis and The North American Indian by conducting and publishing relevant research. The author’s paper, “Duty Bound to Finish: Edward S. Curtis and His Quest for Money to Complete ‘The North American Indian’” is available on Academia.edu

PROJECT
Reconsidering Alice Wells (1927-1988)
2018

With the assistance of the Palmquist Photo Research Fund, I am researching the life and work of Alice Wells (1927-1988), an under-recognized figure in an influential group of photographers during the 1960s and ‘70s. Wells, also known as Alice Andrews, Alisa Witteman, and Alice Wells-Witteman, lived and created in the spirit of that tumultuous time, exploring new identities, new lifestyles, and new photographic styles.

After taking a secretarial job at Kodak in Rochester, New York, in the 1950s, she became fascinated with the then rapidly growing interest in artistic photography. Her personal vision developed so quickly that in 1964 she was given her first one-person show at the George Eastman House. Over the next decade, she immersed herself fully into creative photography, resulting in widespread acclaim that included six one-person shows and thirty-five group exhibitions.

In her photography, Wells continually sought to re-examine both her own vision and the medium’s limits. Her early images fit into the classical school of large format nature and scenic studies, but by 1965 she began to experiment with the boundaries of photographic vision. She used both her camera and the darkroom to create starkly different images that included double exposures, double connected frames of the same scene, solarization, and chemical staining.

In 1965 she worked with her colleague Robert Fichter to create a highly unusual collaborative series using found glass plate negatives. Together they printed the original images and manipulated them to produce other-worldly scenes that called into question our understanding of photographic intentions.

In 1972 Wells moved to New Mexico and entered into a period of self-realization. She became a serious student of Zen Buddhism and slowly began to lose interest in photography. By 1980 she appears to have given it up altogether.

In the groundbreaking 1973 book The Woman’s Eye, Anne Wilkes Tucker devoted fifteen pages to Wells. She compared Wells with Diane Arbus, saying “Wells and Arbus share many of the awarenesses of the current generation―Arbus in the modernity of her approach, Wells in the changes in her lifestyle....”

Among her many defining attributes, Wells refused to be categorized in any way. She once turned down an invitation to be part of an exhibition of women photographers at Lee Witkin’s influential New York gallery, saying “I want to be known as a Photographer and for me any qualification seems to limit my involvement.”

Wells died unexpectedly in Galisteo, New Mexico, in 1988. Her obituary in the local newspaper said simply “She was a photographer.”

I believe Alice Wells deserves a new look because her photography closely reflects both her search for meaning in her life and the parallel emergence of women’s social and political issues during the ‘60s and ‘70s. She created unique works of art but failed to make a living as an artist, struggled with personal relationships. She studied Zen Buddhism in an attempt to find a more peaceful life, and ultimately gave up photography altogether as she questioned her understanding of the world around her.

All of her photographic and written archives are now at the Visual Studies Workshop in Syracuse, NY. The Palmquist funding allowed me to travel there to conduct research. I plan to write one or more articles about her life and work for submission to national photographic magazines and websites.