from the Series "People of the North Portal"
Maker
Crane, Barbara
American, 1928-2019
Date1971
MediumGelatin silver print
Dimensionspaper: 14 in x 11 in
Credit LineGift of Jeanne L. and Richard S. Press
Object number1986:232.129
About the Artist"The issues in my work are often of a similar nature with an abstract edge. Though I build on past experiences, I attempt to eradicate previous habits of seeing and thinking. I keep searching for what is visually new to me while always hoping that a fusion of form and content will take place."— Barbara Crane’s artist statement from 2002
For over 60 years, Barbara Crane worked as a photographer, creating highly formal, often abstracted images of people and the urban and natural landscape. For her Human Forms series (1965), Crane paid her children thirty-five cents an hour to pose for her, on the condition that their faces were not recognizable. Because of the limitations this condition placed on her photographs, Crane began to abstract the images of their bodies, playing with line, shadow, and light, to create the series' elegant forms.
Crane began to play with chance and repetition in her series, People of the North Portal (1970-71), for which she photographed people exiting Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry, recording a wide variety of expressions and reactions. Some full-body shots, others focusing simply on the faces of her subjects, the photographs beautifully depict a large spectrum of human experience.
Taking this approach a step further and into nature, her Whole Roll series from 1975 explored patterns that emerge from the seemingly innocuous events of life, taking chance occurrences and molding them into a complex study of the subject matter. For example, in the image titled Pigeons, Grant Park, Chicago, Illinois (1975), Crane laid on her back in Chicago's Grant Park as her assistant poured pigeon feed all around her, waited for the pigeons to land, and then ran back to scatter them. Crane then cut out the individual negatives, arranged them without looking at them, and contact-printed them together on one sheet, to create an overall image that appears like calligraphy or an Abstract Expressionist painting.
A significant portion of Crane’s artistic career involved working with nature in a freeform way, and she often created works with specimens she gathered at her Michigan cabin retreat. In her series titled Coloma to Covert series made primarily in the 1990s, Crane collected leaves, flowers, fungi, and tree bark, photographing them in high-detail with a large format camera. Multiple photographs of tree bark, held in the Museum of Contemporary Photography collection, are printed at the scale of a human body, and when presented side-by-side amplify Crane’s view of these objects as musical notes or a font, that can be arranged to create a palpable harmony.
Barbara Crane studied at Mills College in California, completed her BA in art history at New York University, and later received her MS from the Institute of Design (at the Illinois Institute of Technology). She taught for 28 years at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship in Photography grant, two National Endowment for the Arts grants, and an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship Award in Photography, Crane participated in 170 group exhibitions and mounted 75 solo exhibitions. She was honored by both the Union League Club of Chicago and Brown University as a Distinguished Artist, as well as by the Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago. Other awards include the Ruth Horwich Award (City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs) and the MoCP Silver Camera Award. Her work is included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, NY and the Art Institute of Chicago; among many others. The MoCP proudly holds over 400 of her works in its permanent collection.
