Ellen Brooks

At 78 years old, Ellen Brooks physical status not available right now. We will update Ellen Brooks's height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, and measurements.

Ellen Brooks (born February 3, 1946) is an American photographer.

She began her career on the West Coast and is active with the Los Angeles-based art scene of the late 1960s and 1970s.

In 1982, she moved to New York, where her practice has since been based.

Her artwork is known for its boundary-pushing forays into sculpture, as well as her use of computer and image editing pro-filmic photo processes.

She has exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Centre Pompidou, as well as others, and has worked in the permanent collections of MOMA, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the National Museum of American Art, and others.

Early works

Ellen Brooks was born in Los Angeles, California. She earned both her Bachelor's degree and her Masters' Degree in Fine Arts from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1968 and 1971 respectively. Her early works revolved mostly around human beings, particularly Beach Piece, an early work in which she used the photographic medium to explore issues of alienation versus bodily presence in space. The work, which featured larger-than-lifesize nude figures in several positions of recline, was on display on Venice Beach, from which the figures appeared to half-emerge from the sand. [Flats 1–5] she created during her graduate studies, which were shown at the Museum of Modern Art in the 1970 exhibition Photography Into Sculpture. The flats addressed similar issues as Beach Piece from the opposite direction, from above to obfuscate the objects' situation in space.

Following her MFA, she moved to San Francisco, where the photograph was used as part of a series of scale and installation investigations. Adolescent Piece, her newest major work, also used nude bodies. The work will later be refabricated and reinstalled in a variety of styles over the next four decades, at the University of Las Vegas, San Francisco Art Institute, and the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art. Its most recent iteration, which was on display at MOCA in 2011, used Xerox transfers from photographic contact sheets, and was reminiscent of the original 1976 process. According to the artist, this exhibition "represents a 'fourth generation' of the photographs." "The first generation was negative; the second, the eight-by-10-inch contact sheet's third, the machine's copy of the contact sheet onto wax paper; and the fourth, the photographs were glued to the gallery walls." Throughout several of the productions, the work attracted significant attention due to the unguardedness of its young, unclothed subjects, who were all between the ages of ten and fifteen.

Brooks worked on an extended series called Tableaux from the 1970s to 1980s. The Tableaux used the reduced size of maquettes to film still-esque scenes of domestic interiors and dilemmas, often including disarray or ambiguous situations within their three walls. These were supposed to represent both the rote "stock" characters of soap opera as well as domestic dramas crafted from real life experiences and magazines, with miniature figures and other ephemera from the everyday world. The scenes were shot and then sized up a bit. In 1982, the exhibition was on display at Barbara Gladstone Gallery, and a collection of the works was also included in the 1983 Whitney Biennial.

Brooks unveiled light boxes of photo transparencies as a site-specific window display at the New Museum of Contemporary Art's then-location on Broadway in 1985. The display's location was designed to imply the work's geographic location in terms of its physical location, using largely staged iconography appropriated from various cultural intersections of art and commerce.

Brooks started translating her desire in appropriated and generic images to a concrete process, with ever-increasing distances from the source material. The artist used a black foam-based material that she would refer to as a screen, which compressed and flattened visual information. The screen, placed between the camera and the subject, was used in advertising print, calendars, and other reproductions, and was used as an additional point of interception between the initial object and its image.

Brooks has diversified her sculpture work from maquettes to large-scale sculptural reconstruals of photo-based printed fabrics, resulting in a series of optically charged large-format abstract photographs. The sculptures are used as source material for the final photographs and extend solely to the final photographs.

She worked with the Tisch School of the Arts in New York City from 1985 to 2008, and among other places, she has taught at Cooper Union, the School of Visual Arts, and the Rhode Island School of Design. She was a recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts grant twice in 1979 and 1991, served on the final NEA panel for photography, shortly before the Association's funding and subsequent destruction of many of its programs.

In 2011, she was included in two retrospective exhibitions: for Los Angeles' Under the Big Black Sun exhibition as part of the Pacific Standard Time citywide initiative, and in Photography, at Cherry and Martin Gallery. She lives and works in New York City.

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