Barbara Crane

Courtesy of Barbara Crane Trust.

Barbara Crane was a pioneering, internationally renowned art photographer and educator, who explored photography as a vehicle for creative expression for more than sixty years. A forerunner in experimental and abstract photography, Crane engaged numerous photographic processes throughout her extensive career—resulting in a body of conceptually consistent work that varied in approach and experimental style. An early investigator of repetition and deconstruction of visual information, she experimented extensively with sequences, grids, scrolls, and large modular murals. Crane worked in many formats and materials, ranging from intimate in size to large scale, using various photographic processes. This image is noted by her estate as being a particularly rare and unique image from the Private Views series, with only a few copies being produced and distributed. This particular photograph was made by Crane on a handheld 8 x 10 view camera.

Born in Chicago in 1928, Crane was one of the United States’ leading photographic artists. Her work has been featured in more than ninety solo exhibitions since 1965 and seven retrospective exhibitions of her work have been mounted to date. Her work is the permanent collection of the Museum of Contemporary Photography (MoCP), Chicago, among numerous other public and private holdings of her work. Crane has been the recipient of National Endowment for the Arts grants, a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship in photography, and many distinguished awards. She began teaching photography in 1964 and in 1967 joined the faculty at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, retiring from teaching in 1995 as professor emerita.