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Chicago is in the midst of a Barbara Crane festival with three exhibitions of her photographs going on all at once. At the Chicago Cultural Center, our kunsthaus, is 'Barbara Crane: Challenging Vision', a retrospective of 300 photographs that she's produced since 1966. According to Kenneth Burkhart, exhibition curator, people have been talking about a Crane retrospective for 20 years, but funds became available only recently. Burkhart thinks the show is much better now because it includes new work that Crane made between her sixtieth and eightieth birthdays.
A second, smaller retrospective is up at the Illinois Institute of Technology which celebrates Crane's adherence to the Institute of Design aesthetic (of which more in a moment). The Stephen Daiter gallery is presenting 'Private Views/Public Spaces: Photographs by Barbara Crane' through December. Shows are coming in New York and Paris.
Barbara Crane (b. 1928) has been taking pictures since childhood. After college, marriage, and motherhood, she trained as a serious photographer in the Bauhaus tradition. A tireless experimenter, she has produced roughly 40 different bodies of work since completing her Master's Degree in 1966.
Crane is a Modernist, a spiritual grandchild of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, the Hungarian-born artist-polymath who came to Chicago from Europe in 1937 to become the first director of the New Bauhaus. This school of art and design was Chicago's update of Germany's Bauhaus, which flourished in Weimar and Dessau from 1919 to 1933.
Moholy had impeccable Modernist credentials. He came to Berlin from Hungary in January of 1920 and soon transformed himself from a competent landscape and portrait painter into an avant-garde photographer, painter, and draftsman. Under Russian Constructivist and Dadaist influence he learned collage, photomontage, and typography. In 1922 he made his first photograms (camera-less photographs) by laying objects on chemically coated paper and flooding it with light. The paper remained white where it was covered and turned dark where it was exposed to the light. He created shadows and gray tones by moving the light source and the objects. Light would become the leading subject of Moholy's art.
In 1923, Walter Gropius, the architect and founder (in 1919) of the Bauhaus in Weimar, invited Moholy to teach the Bauhaus Foundation Course. In this class, students explored the fundamentals of art, design, and object making in experiment and problem-based workshops--carpentry, metal, pottery, stained glass, wall painting, weaving , graphics, typography, and stagecraft. While Gropius' goal was to train architects, the Bauhaus curriculum was perfectly suited to artists and photographers. Moholy taught at the Bauhaus until 1928 and lived in Amsterdam and London before coming to Chicago.
The New Bauhaus ran out of funds after just one year, but in 1939 Moholy founded the successor School of Design. Organized along Bauhaus lines, the School of Design made photography an essential part of its curriculum. Students learned Moholy's techniques and absorbed his spirit. "The enemy of photography is the convention," he stated. "The salvation of photography comes from experiment." Moholy's approach to teaching and making revolutionized photography in the United States and made Chicago a national center for photography, which it remains to this day.
The School of Design became the Institute of Design (ID) in 1944. Before he died in 1946, Moholy hired the photographer Harry Callahan who taught brilliantly there for 15 years, ten of them in partnership with Aaron Siskind, the photographer that he hired in 1951. It was Siskind who reviewed Barbara Crane's portfolio in 1964, admitted her to the ID's graduate program, and became her mentor. One of Crane's first acts at the ID was voluntarily to enroll in the Foundation Course.
Crane's first mature photographs were nudes, but she employed the figure in experiments with light, shadow, focus, multiple exposure, texture, and contrast. There's nothing sensual about her nudes and she has never sought decorative effects in her work. Her cool treatment of the figure carries over in her numerous photographs of people enjoying summer in Chicago's streets and parks. There's no documentation or local color in these images: Crane presents human beings without comment and conveys no suggestion of income, class, or racial difference. She never peeps, mocks, or exploits her subjects as political symbols.
People of the North Portal (1970-71) shows men, women, and families entering and leaving Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry. We see the north portal outlined in bronze and two bronze and glass doors whose weight and bulk must somehow be negotiated to get in or out. Some struggle with the doors while others just glide through. Gesture tells their story.
Gesture is everywhere in Beaches and Parks (1972-78), a multi-year body of work that Crane shot along Chicago's lakefront. We see faces in these images, but arms and legs tell us much more. Kids in bathing suits pump their arms as they burst out of the water. A couple dances with knees bent, hips tilted, and arms up. A smiling middle-aged woman lifts binoculars to her eyes as her admiring husband watches.
Gesture is central to other people sequences, especially Maricopa County Fair (1979-80), which Crane shot in Arizona. Her color Polaroids of torsos seen from behind suggest different relationships between pairs of people. A mother holds her child. A woman hangs onto her guy. One man places his arm on another's shoulder as they talk. Cowboy hats, clear sky, and the desert light bespeak the geographic setting.
Crane has experimented life-long with the photographic process and especially with Polaroid film which the manufacturer provided to her in exchange for prints beginning in 1979. Using the Polaroid camera, she took pictures of Arizona people and landscape. She taught herself how to make image transfer prints by taking partially developed Polaroid SX-70 prints and pressing the gelatinous image onto art paper. The result was colored lines or marks reversing out of a black background. In Polaroid SX-70 Grids (1980), she mounted these small prints like windows in a frame to create formal, abstract, and quite beautiful images. She also made humorous grids of red polka dots on blue and yellow backgrounds.
During 1987, Crane purchased a vacation cabin near Chicago in the Michigan woods and created a large body of work over several years that she called From Coloma to Covert after two nearby Michigan towns. In her pictures of the surrounding woods, she experimented with focus, depth of field, and solarization, producing some images of vegetation that are mostly blinding white. She photographed found objects too, including the dried head of a dead opossum with its teeth ferociously bared. Before shooting, she mounted the objects on black backgrounds like laboratory specimens. Mouse Snaps (2002), one of her most amusing works, is a grid of 25 mice caught in traps.
Throughout her career, Crane has experimented with design, mounting her photographs in grids, long strips, pairs, trios, scrolls, and montages with images of different size. All her arrangements are quite formal. She does not make collages which would imply a degree of randomness.
The Wrightsville Beach series (1971) is a photo impression of a South Carolina town with mounted images of houses, the beach, local people, and interiors at different scales. In Repeats (1975), Crane mounts related images of tar or mountains right side up and upside down in pairs, then places similar images side by side to make long strips. Tarscape (1975), which shows tar on concrete, is two inches high by six feet long. Other Repeats depict aluminum rowboats, trucks on the highway, and clothes on a line. The clothes montage looks so much like an abstraction that we must look very closely to see what Crane has done.
The Coloma to Covert series includes diptyches, triptychs, and scrolls comprised of nature photographs mounted side by side but never quite matching. These works convey us into the realm of the imagination--Crane's, for it was she who made them--and our own, for we find things in her arrangements that go beyond the object she was photographing. Crane spends hours in her studio placing her photo images side by side to create these mysterious, provocative juxtapositions.
Barbara Crane is 81 years old this year and she comes into the studio every day because that's where she wants to be. "I keep chasing perfection," she says, "the perfect negative, the perfect image, the perfect group of images; it's the chase that's so exciting, so all-consuming."
Victor M. Cassidy
Barbara Crane
Until 12 December
Stephen Daiter
311 West Superior Street
404 & 408
Chicago, IL 60654
T + 1 312 787 3350
Barbara Crane: Challenging Vision
Until 10 January 2010
Chicago Cultural Center
Exhibit Hall
78 E. Washington St
Chicago, IL 60602 |
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| Victor M. Cassidy is an art journalist and art critic. His work appears regularly in ArtNet.com, Art in America, Black & White, and Sculpture. |
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| Published on 06-11-2009 |
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