Exhibition prints are available for purchase (see below).
Urban Zips combines my longstanding work in street photography with my love of abstract expressionist painting. It is the work of Barnett Newman (1905-1970) that inspired this project. He created what he called “zips”: large “color field” paintings in which the entire canvas is covered with a single color, and is then bisected by one or more thin bands—or zips—of another color.
My own “zips” are single-frame, composite images where a close-up shot of an urban surface is sliced by one or more bands of my classic street photography.
Within the frame, I build formal correspondences, conflicts, and narrative layers. The result veers toward abstraction, but the reality-based source is always present. While Urban Zips hint at elements of character and narrative, they complicate principles of physical reality: scale, perspective, the relation of figure to ground, and in some cases, time.
Since creating Urban Zips, I've also been branching out to collage.
Exhibition prints (20x30") are available for purchase (editions of 7); contact Ellen. (Other sizes available upon request.)
© Ellen Feldman Photography 2021, 2025. All rights reserved.
