PARIS.- The Centre Pompidou presents the first major exhibition in Europe dedicated to internationally acclaimed American photographer Barbara Crane (b. Chicago, 1928 – 2019), whose career spans more than sixty years. The exhibition brings together more than 200 works, some of which have recently been acquired by the Musée National d’Art Moderne. In partnership with the Barbara B. Crane Trust, it focuses on the first 25 years of the artist’s career, featuring hundreds of her major works, many of them never exhibited before. Barbara Crane was the creator of a plural body of work, consistently exploring form and photographic techniques (gelatin-silver and digital prints, Polaroid instant prints, photographic transfers, platinum-palladium prints, color, black and white, etc), as shown in the exhibition’s selection.
Barbara Crane studied Photography and Art History at Mills College (California) and New York University, then became a professional photographer, specialised in portraits. She continued her training with Aaron Siskind, at the Institute of Design in Chicago in the 1960s, then taught Photography at the Art Institute of Chicago from 1967 to 1995.
Her work is remarkable for the synthesis it achieves between the American straight photography tradition and a more experimental sensibility, inherited from European avant-garde movements, typical of teachings of the Chicago school. She combines total freedom towards the medium with technical perfectionism, thus setting her apart from her contemporaries. Her photographic approach to the city, Chicago in particular, and its anonymous inhabitants, became truly unique. Both the artistic context in which she evolved, marked by structuralism and conceptual art, and her many influences – from John Cage to Henri Matisse, including choreographer Merce Cunningham and experimental cinema – inspired her practice, dominated by the concepts of sequence and series, accident and discipline.
Though it can be found in many public and private American collections, Barbara Crane’s work remains largely unknown in France. A major retrospective was devoted to her in 2009, presented at the Chicago Cultural Center, Amon Carter Museum in Texas and Griffin Museum of Photography in Massachusetts.
Human Forms, 1964-1968
Taken with a 4x5 inch view camera as part of her degree at the Institute of Design in Chicago, the Human Forms series testifies to Barbara Crane’s early research into light, volume and line. Unable to go out because she had to look after her children, the artist decided to photograph them. Without ever showing their faces, she focused on the contours of their anonymous bodies, reduced to pure light forms. Crane explained that she was seeking to “produce something like a sketch delineated by clear black lines”. Her experimental approach to photography, a core aspect of the classes given at ID, became central to her work and would remain its underlying matrix.
Neon series, 1969
When staying in Las Vegas in 1969, the artist photographed the city’s neon signs using a 4x5 inch view camera with a Polaroid print. Using double exposure, Crane produced unsettling combinations of motifs and letters. Enthused by the results – due as much to virtuosic technical skill as to chance – the artist used an identical procedure in Chicago a few months later. This time, she overlaid neon motifs onto close-up portraits of individuals taken as they came out of a department store. Faces captured on the fly blend with graphic forms in these semi-abstract compositions that already seem to herald the two themes around which Crane’s oeuvre invariably oscillated: documentary aims and experimentation with form.
People of the North Portal, 1970-1971
This series is composed of two parts: Doors and Heads. The images from the first part were taken with a Deardorff 4x5 camera, convertible to 5x7, that Barbara Crane positioned opposite the northern entrance of the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. Using a strict protocol, she photographed people entering and leaving the building through the doors. The second part is composed of tight-framed close-ups of these passers-by, taken with a 35mm camera as Crane herself walked through the museum doors. A vast inventory of expressions, postures and gestures that features over 2,000 images, People of the North Portal offers a living portrait of Chicago. The series falls within the scope of American street photography’s tradition, questioning the photographer’s role in the urban space.
Beaches and Parks, 1972-1978
In 1972, Barbara Crane began a large-scale project on the beaches and parks of Chicago on fine days, photographing groups of families and friends using a Super Speed Graphic that she hand-held.. The artist was attentive to the choreographic dimension of the bodies of the people sunbathing, jumping and dancing. She particularly liked shots with surprising framing, sometimes taken at waist height. These images challenge the codes of street photography: instead of the street, it is the beach and park that become the backdrop to collective jubilation. The spontaneity and irony emanating from these pictures reflect the sense of freedom often associated with the 1970s.
Whole Roll, 1974-1978
It reflects the artist’s constant to-ing and fro-ing between on-site photography and experimentations in the darkroom. For this series, she divided an entire roll of exposed 35mm film into strips (sometimes two) and placed them in an enlarger, shaping a new visual story in the process. The traditional use of contact prints is subverted: instead of being a simple working document, it becomes an artwork in its own right. As is often the case in Crane’s œuvre, the work only acquires meaning through a meticulous process of repetition, multiplication and sequential lay out. Whether shooting a group of people or small pieces of debris, the artist assembles an overabundance of motifs in compositions akin to enigmatic mosaics.
Baxter Labs, 1974-1976
Alongside her teaching job at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), Barbara Crane received commissions from institutions, that also fed into her research. After producing 20 or so extra-large murals for the Baxter/Travenol pharmaceutical companies (Illinois), Crane continued her exploration of works in smaller configurations. Baxter Labs reflects Crane’s interest in the multiplication of motifs and their presentation in a new coherent whole. The combination of negatives in the enlarger gives birth to new abstract graphic forms generally arranged around a central image in the foreground. With this radical photographic gesture, Barbara Crane played, not without irony, on the optical effects produced in the darkroom.
Loop Series, 1976-1978
Between 1972 and 1979, Barbara Crane photographed buildings in Chicago as part of a commission for the Chicago Commission on Historical and Architectural Landmarks. It was during this time that she familiarised herself with architectural photography and incorporated it into her personal work. With her heavy 5x7 inch view camera installed on a golf bag with big wheels, Crane scrutinised the historic neighbourhood of the Loop. Keen to go beyond simple architectural representation, she paid particular attention to the cohabitation between the old and the modern, to the way in which light interacted with the facades at different times of the day, and the framing. She produced compositions bordering on abstraction: “I was entranced by the random layers of textures, tones, and planes, all adding up to an explosion of visual excitement”, she said.
Chicago Epic, 1976
Born of a commission for the Chicago Bank of Commerce, the first version of this work was a print measuring nearly seven metres long. The artist later made other versions that were smaller but no less monumental. Here, Crane combines a multitude of motifs using superimposition of negatives and contact printing: architectural views, portraits of passers-by, pigeons in flight and hidden self-portraits. The artist’s interest in the association of a wide range of motifs can be seen in this photomontage with its infinite perspectives and multiple uses of transparency. This “controlled chaos”, as Crane described it, is iconic of the artist’s practice, in a quest to translate the hustle and bustle of Chicago into an exceptional and radical work in both its format and total character.
On The Fence, 1979-1980
At the end of 1979, Barbara Crane moved to Tucson, in Arizona, after receiving a Guggenheim Foundation grant. She also benefited from a partnership with Polaroid through the Artist Support Program. This agreement consisted in a regular supply of Polaroid equipment in exchange for prints and marked a turning point in her career: the automatic colour process henceforth played a role of prime importance. In the backyard of her apartment, Barbara Crane laid an eclectic range of objects from her everyday surroundings on a piece of wire fence and photographed them. These fragile arrangements, a celebration of the banal, are like photographic readymades. They testify to a very personal vision of the Far West, in which cactus, feathers and leather jacket sit side-by-side - not without a note of humour - with a slide carousel and undergarments.
Maricopa County Fair, 1979-1980 Private Views, 1980-1984
In 1979, Barbara Crane photographed visitors to the Maricopa County Fair (Arizona). She took countless shots of these anonymous people, using Polacolor Type 668 film with a Polaroid camera (or a 4×5 camera with a Polaroid film holder). On her return to Chicago, she perfected the technique of producing this kind of image at open-air festivals, using a Speed Graphic 4x5 inch camera fitted with a Polaroid film back. It reveals the empathy in Crane’s regard, with gestures of tenderness and other marks of complicity emerging from the darkness. She explained: “I wanted to get rid of everything but the one thing I want to show, that one gesture that says a lot. I found myself inching closer, physically to my subjects. When I first started shooting, I used to be about ten feet from a person. In the end I was more like ten inches”.
Objet Trouvé, 1982-1983
Taken out of context, these photographed objects take on new forms that are difficult to identify. The tangle of materials suggests mysterious protean tools. These arrangements with surrealist accents bear within them the beauty of the useless and are striking in the delicacy of their creation. Barbara Crane made platinum-palladium contact prints on handmade coloured paper. She explained: “a run over tin can or discarded child’s hairbrush, flattened and distorted over time, once observed and absorbed became strangely familiar and emblematic of the cycles of life in the city. In their transformation these objects take on a formal beauty that is haunted with transience”.
Repeats, 1974-1975
The Repeats function like rhythmic variations on a single visual motif. In assembling her negatives, the artist placed them upside down, creating true graphic landscapes. Hypnotic horizontal prints, often bordering on abstraction, emerge from this obsessional operation of repetition that reflects, in the artists’ words, “the idea of play, transformation and infinity”. Classical music played an important role in the creation process for this series. While listening to symphonic concerts, the photographer took notes on the rhythms she heard in a notebook “as visual diagrams of the crescendos, legatos and staccatos in order to widen my visual experience”, before transcribing them through photographic experimentation.
Monster Series, 1982-1983
Monster Series reflects Barbara Crane’s fascination with the strange from the 1980s onwards. Casting her eyes over Chicago harbors, the artist photographed the dry docks where ships were being repaired. Captured in darkness and decontextualised by the tight framing and use of extreme close-ups, parts of boats and sections of rope are evocative of silent monsters. These curious forms with a surreal air fill the frame to the point of unsettling the viewer. Through her careful attention to these nautical elements, Crane gives life to the inanimate. Material effects – erosion or wear – become uncanny organic and geometric motifs.
Wipe Outs, 1986
Wipe outs refers to a series but also a method that Barbara Crane used on several occasions in the 1980s. Using a slide duplicator, she copied over-exposed colour slides onto a black- and-white positive/negative film, from which she obtained a gelatine silver print. The intimate interactions of the individuals photographed at point-blank range are tinged with a sense of strangeness through the colours of the prints. Through her use of flash and a wide-angle lens, the faces emerge from the darkness and fade to become no more than a brutally anonymised silhouette. In her own words, Barbara Crane aimed for “an uncanny tension I construct to reach and disturb the viewer”.
