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Barbara Morgan (photographer)
Encyclopedia
Barbara Morgan was an American photographer best known for her work in dance. She was a co-founder of the photography magazine Aperture
.
, Merce Cunningham
, Erick Hawkins
, Jose Limon
, Doris Humphrey
, and others. Her photomontage and light drawings rank among the classic experiments of modern American photographic art. Morgan’s drawings, prints, watercolors and paintings were exhibited widely in California in the 1920s, and in New York and Philadelphia in the 1930s. She became a photographer in 1935 to allow more time for raising her children, and subsequently resumed work in drawing, watercolor, and painting as well, which continued through the 1970s.
EARLY TRAINING AND LEARNING
Barbara Morgan’s art training at UCLA, 1919–23, was based on Arthur Wesley Dow’s
principles of art “synthesis.” Abstract design was taught parallel to figurative drawing and painting. And art history was taught with equal emphasis on the Primitive, Asian, and European traditions.
While a student she read from the Chinese Six Canons of Painting, about “rhythmic vitality”– or essence of life force – the artist’s goal of expression. This concept related directly to her father’s teaching that all things are made of “dancing atoms,” and remained a guiding philosophy throughout her life as an artist.
Morgan joined the faculty at UCLA in 1925 and became an advocate for modern art when many of her colleagues were oriented to a traditional approach to art. She exhibited her drawings, prints and watercolors throughout California. In 1929, Los Angeles Times critic Arthur Miller states: “One of the finest sets of prints in the show is that by Barbara Morgan, and these chance also to be the most abstract works here. … Miss Morgan serves it with an aesthetic sauce that is not produced in a casual kitchen. So abstract has she become that we see her taking hints from Kandinsky, arch abstractionist of them all.” And in the same year, Prudence Wollet of the LA Times wrote: “For out and out independence, Barbara Morgan has taken the most liberties yet… I contend that this experimenter bears watching.”
In 1925, Barbara Johnson married Willard D. Morgan
, a writer who illustrated his articles with his own photographs. Barbara assisted Willard in photographing the modern architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright
and Richard Neutra
, including a full documentation of the building of the Lovell House
. Willard saw the importance of photography, which he claimed to be the real modern art of the twentieth century. Barbara continued to paint, feeling that photography was “useful only as record.” In 1927, Barbara co-curated an exhibition of Edward Weston’s
work with colleague Annita Delano in the UCLA Gallery. Weston’s rich, brilliant prints of Californian and Mexican subject matter “rang the bell” for her. “Yes, photography is an Art!” she proclaimed.
THE SOUTHWEST
Every summer when classes were over, Willard and Barbara loaded their car, the “Packrat,” with painting and photography equipment and headed for the desert. Barbara painted as much as possible for winter exhibits and helped Willard photograph for articles. Willard had two Model A Leicas, with which the couple photographed each other in cliff ruins, climbing Rainbow Bridge
, in the Hopi mesas and canyons. The resulting photographs were among the first 35mm images to appear in American magazines.
The Southwest experiences were deeply influential for Barbara Morgan. The stratification of Grand Canyon
and Monument Valley
attuned her to geologic time; Mesa Verde Cliff Dwellings to ancient human time. The Navajo and Pueblo Indian tribes through ritual dance displayed their “partnership in the cosmic process” and connected her to the universally primal.
NEW YORK AND THE EAST
In response to the Leica-illustrated articles, E. Leitz, Inc. offered Willard a job publicizing the new 35mm camera. The couple moved to New York City in the summer of 1930. After one year traveling the east with Willard, Barbara set up a printmaking studio in 1931, and Carl Zigrosser of the Weyhe Gallery exhibited her woodcuts and new lithographs of city themes. The impact of the city, masses of people, traffic, buildings and the east, were in counterpoint to her memories of the Southwest. Out of this subject matter, symbolic forms emerged and she began to paint more abstractly, exhibiting her new work in a solo show at the Mellon Gallery in Philadelphia. While at UCLA, Barbara had been offered a scholarship by Dr. Albert Barnes
, so while traveling the east, she visited his art collection in Merion, Pennsylvania. As a form of study, he allowed Willard and Barbara to photograph his entire collection. While photographing a Sudan fertility icon and an Ivory Coast totemic mask, she discovered that she could make these ritual sculptures seem either menacing or benign, simply by control of lighting. This experience of dramatization of controllable meanings by light manipulation became the prelude to “psychological lighting” of dance for camera compositions.
Barbara Morgan was deeply involved in the American Artists' Congress
from its inception in 1936 and served as an exhibition committee member during Stuart Davis’
presidency of the Congress from 1937-1939.
PHOTOGRAPHY
With two young children, Douglas born in 1932 and Lloyd in 1935, Barbara sought a workable way to be both a mother and an artist. To abandon painting in favor of photography promised to be traumatic, but for two saving factors; first, an idea for a future book presented itself, and second, photography does not require the uninterrupted daylight hours as does painting, and one might work at night in the darkroom. Although Barbara had exposed thousands of images, she still did not consider herself a photographer because she hadn’t completed the cycle of developing and printing. She set up a new studio with a darkroom at 10 East 23rd Street, overlooking Madison Square
, and began experimenting with the technical and darkroom aspects of photography. Systematically, she learned processing from Willard and worked on other gaps in her technique, chiefly with the 4x5 Speed Graphic and Leica with all lenses. She worked with Harold Harvey as he was perfecting his Replenishing Fine Grain Developer 777, and explored photomontage.
DANCE PHOTOGRAPHY
That same year, Barbara attended a performance of the young Martha Graham Dance Company. She was immediately struck with the historical and social importance of the emerging American Modern Dance movement:
“The photographers and painters who dealt with the Depression, often, it seemed to me, only added to defeatism without giving courage or hope. Yet the galvanizing protest danced by Martha Graham
, Humphrey-Weidman
, Tamiris
and others was heartening. Often nearly starving, they never gave up, but forged life affirming dance statements of American society in stress and strain. In this role, their dance reminded me of Indian ceremonial dances which invigorate the tribe in drought and difficulty.”
Morgan conceived of her book project Martha Graham: Sixteen Dances in Photographs (1941)- the year she met Graham. From 1936 through the 1940s she photographed more than 40 established dancers and choreographers, and she described her process:
“To epitomize…a dance with camera, stage performances are inadequate, because in that situation one can only fortuitously record. For my interpretation it was necessary to redirect, relight, and photographically synthesize what I felt to be the core of the total dance.”
Many of these dancers are now regarded as the pioneers of modern dance, and her photographs as the definitive images of their art. These included Valerie Bettis
, Merce Cunningham
, Jane Dudley
, Erick Hawkins
, Hanya Holm
, Doris Humphrey
, Jose Limon
, Sophie Maslow
, May O’Donnell, Pearl Primus
, Anna Sokolow
, Helen Tamiris
, and Charles Weidman
. Critics Clive Barnes
, John Martin
, Elizabeth McCausland, and Beaumont Newhall
have all noted that Morgan’s work is an unmatched testament, document and interpretation.
Graham and Morgan developed a relationship that would last some 60 years. Their correspondence attests to their mutual affection, trust and respect. In 1980, Graham stated:
“It is rare that even an inspired photographer possesses the demonic eye which can capture the instant of dance and transform it into timeless gesture. In Barbara Morgan I found that person. In looking at these photographs today, I feel, as I felt when I first saw them, privileged to have been a part of this collaboration. For to me, Barbara Morgan through her art reveals the inner landscape that is a dancer’s world.”
In 1945, with sponsorship by the National Gallery and the State Department, Morgan mounted the exhibition La Danza Moderna Norte-Americana: Fotografias por Barbara Morgan – 44 panel mounted enlargements, exhibited first at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, before a South American tour.
PHOTOMONTAGE & LIGHT DRAWING
Pushed by her quest to do more with photography, Morgan “began to feel the pervasive, vibratory character of light energy as a partner of the physical and spiritual energy of the dance, and as the prime mover of the photographic process. “Suddenly, I decided to pay my respects to light, and create a rhythmical light design for the book tailpiece.” She described herself as a “kinetic light sculptor,” creating gestural light drawings with an open shuttered camera in her darkened studio.
Although photomontage was enthusiastically practiced in Europe and Latin America in the 1930s and 40s, it was alien to American photography and widely disparaged. Morgan’s knowledge of the European avant-garde, and her friendship with Lucia and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy
, furthered her interest in montage. She was particularly stuck by how the genre could capture the multiplicity of modern American life. She worked with themes of social concern, natural and constructed environments, and human dignity.
SUMMER’S CHILDREN AND BOOK DESIGN
Over the years her great interest in children’s growth inspired many camp, school and college photographic jobs, and her own projects, which culminated in the book, Summer’s Children (1951). Beaumont Newhall
, of George Eastman House
stated, “Barbara Morgan has made her book of universal appeal. Her sensitive photographs, skillfully combined with words, capture the world of youth with heartiness and tenderness, humor and sympathy. Summer’s Children is a moving interpretation of the magic world of youth.”
Morgan also designed and photo-edited The World of Albert Schweitzer
, by Erica Anderson, Harper & Brothers, 1955, and made the photographs for Prestini’s Art in Wood, for Pocohontas Press in 1950.
CONTRIBUTIONS
Morgan’s life and art were both infused with this profound sense of energy and purposefulness. “I’m not just a ‘Photographer’ or a ‘Painter,’” she asserted, “but a visually aware human being searching out ways to communicate the intensities of life.” She possessed an innate capacity for close associations and lasting friendships with some of the most creative minds of her time, exchanging letters with Edward Weston
, Gordon Parks
, Margaret Mead
, Buckminster Fuller
, Joseph Campbell
, William Carlos Williams
, Dorthea Lange, Stuart Davis
, Richard Neutra
, and Charles Sheeler
, among many others. She was a deep and trusted friend of Berenice Abbott
, Wynn Bullock
, Minor White
, Ansel Adams
, and Nancy and Beaumont Newhall
. In 1952, Morgan founded Aperture Magazine
with Adams, Lange, White and the Newhalls. Morgan exhibited widely, including a second solo show at Museum of Modern Art
, New York, and lectured nationally for nearly five decades. She was a guest instructor for the Ansel Adams
Yosemite Workshops in 1970 and 71. At Black Mountain College
, she was on the faculty of Art Summer Institute in 1944 with Walter Gropius
and Josef and Anni Albers
, among others. Her numerous articles in journals, her commentaries on art and photography, and her voluminous, lively correspondence have yet to be studied in depth. “How wonderful to behold a person who has developed all of these capacities because of her practice of living as a whole being,” Minor White wrote in the introduction to a 1964 issue of Aperture dedicated to her work.
References
Black Mountain College Bulletin, Art Institute, (Summer 1944)
Carter, Curtis L. and Agee, William C. (1988). Barbara Morgan, Prints Drawings, Watercolors and Photographs. Milwaukee: Marquette University. ISBN 0871002612
Ewing, William A. (1987) The Fugitive Gesture: Masterpieces of Dance Photography. London: Thames and Hudson Ltd.
First American Artists’ Congress 1936, New York City (1936)
Mitchell, Margaretta K. (1979) Recollections: Ten Women of Photography. Viking Studio Book
Morgan, Barbara (1964) Barbara Morgan, Aperture 11:1
Morgan, Barbara (1941)(1980) Martha Graham: Sixteen Dances in Photographs. New York, Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 2nd Ed. Dobbs Ferry, New York: Morgan & Morgan (1980) ISBN 0871001764
Newhall, Beaumont (1952). Magazine of Art. The American Federation of Arts (March 1952)
Patnaik, Deb P. (1999) Barbara Morgan, Masters of Photography, New York: Aperture. ISBN 0893818259
Aperture (magazine)
Aperture is a quarterly photography magazine and a book publisher based in New York, New York. The magazine is published by Aperture Foundation, a non-profit organization devoted to fine art photography.-Magazine:...
.
Biography
Barbara Brooks Morgan, 1900–1992, is well known in the visual art and dance worlds for her penetrating photographic studies of American Modern dancers Martha GrahamMartha Graham
Martha Graham was an American modern dancer and choreographer whose influence on dance has been compared with the influence Picasso had on modern visual arts, Stravinsky had on music, or Frank Lloyd Wright had on architecture.She danced and choreographed for over seventy years...
, Merce Cunningham
Merce Cunningham
Mercier "Merce" Philip Cunningham was an American dancer and choreographer who was at the forefront of the American avant-garde for more than 50 years. Throughout much of his life, Cunningham was considered one of the greatest creative forces in American dance...
, Erick Hawkins
Erick Hawkins
Frederick Hawkins known as Erick Hawkins was a leading American modern-dance choreographer and dancer...
, Jose Limon
José Limón
José Arcadio Limón was a pioneer in the field of modern dance and choreography. In 1928, at age 20, he moved to New York City where he studied under Doris Humphrey and Charles Weidman. In 1946, Limón founded the José Limón Dance Company...
, Doris Humphrey
Doris Humphrey
Doris Batcheller Humphrey was a dancer and choreographer of the early twentieth century. Humphrey was born in Oak Park, Illinois but grew up in Chicago, Illinois. She was the daughter of Horace Buckingham Humphrey and Julia Ellen Wells and was a descendant of pilgrim William Brewster...
, and others. Her photomontage and light drawings rank among the classic experiments of modern American photographic art. Morgan’s drawings, prints, watercolors and paintings were exhibited widely in California in the 1920s, and in New York and Philadelphia in the 1930s. She became a photographer in 1935 to allow more time for raising her children, and subsequently resumed work in drawing, watercolor, and painting as well, which continued through the 1970s.
EARLY TRAINING AND LEARNING
Barbara Morgan’s art training at UCLA, 1919–23, was based on Arthur Wesley Dow’s
Arthur Wesley Dow
Arthur Wesley Dow was an American painter, printmaker, photographer, and influential arts educator....
principles of art “synthesis.” Abstract design was taught parallel to figurative drawing and painting. And art history was taught with equal emphasis on the Primitive, Asian, and European traditions.
While a student she read from the Chinese Six Canons of Painting, about “rhythmic vitality”– or essence of life force – the artist’s goal of expression. This concept related directly to her father’s teaching that all things are made of “dancing atoms,” and remained a guiding philosophy throughout her life as an artist.
Morgan joined the faculty at UCLA in 1925 and became an advocate for modern art when many of her colleagues were oriented to a traditional approach to art. She exhibited her drawings, prints and watercolors throughout California. In 1929, Los Angeles Times critic Arthur Miller states: “One of the finest sets of prints in the show is that by Barbara Morgan, and these chance also to be the most abstract works here. … Miss Morgan serves it with an aesthetic sauce that is not produced in a casual kitchen. So abstract has she become that we see her taking hints from Kandinsky, arch abstractionist of them all.” And in the same year, Prudence Wollet of the LA Times wrote: “For out and out independence, Barbara Morgan has taken the most liberties yet… I contend that this experimenter bears watching.”
In 1925, Barbara Johnson married Willard D. Morgan
Willard D Morgan
Willard D Morgan -Biography:Willard Detering Morgan was a man of wide accomplishments in the field of photography and publishing, and his career spanned some of the most influential developments in the history of photography...
, a writer who illustrated his articles with his own photographs. Barbara assisted Willard in photographing the modern architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright
Frank Lloyd Wright
Frank Lloyd Wright was an American architect, interior designer, writer and educator, who designed more than 1,000 structures and completed 500 works. Wright believed in designing structures which were in harmony with humanity and its environment, a philosophy he called organic architecture...
and Richard Neutra
Richard Neutra
Richard Joseph Neutra is considered one of modernism's most important architects.- Biography :Neutra was born in Leopoldstadt, the 2nd district of Vienna, Austria Hungary, on April 8, 1892. He was born into both-Jewish wealthy family...
, including a full documentation of the building of the Lovell House
Lovell House
The Lovell House or Lovell Health House is an International style modernist residence designed and built by Richard Neutra between 1927-29. The home, located at 4616 Dundee Drive in Los Angeles, California, was built for the physician and naturopath Philip Lovell...
. Willard saw the importance of photography, which he claimed to be the real modern art of the twentieth century. Barbara continued to paint, feeling that photography was “useful only as record.” In 1927, Barbara co-curated an exhibition of Edward Weston’s
Edward Weston
Edward Henry Weston was a 20th century American photographer. He has been called "one of the most innovative and influential American photographers…" and "one of the masters of 20th century photography." Over the course of his forty-year career Weston photographed an increasingly expansive set of...
work with colleague Annita Delano in the UCLA Gallery. Weston’s rich, brilliant prints of Californian and Mexican subject matter “rang the bell” for her. “Yes, photography is an Art!” she proclaimed.
THE SOUTHWEST
Every summer when classes were over, Willard and Barbara loaded their car, the “Packrat,” with painting and photography equipment and headed for the desert. Barbara painted as much as possible for winter exhibits and helped Willard photograph for articles. Willard had two Model A Leicas, with which the couple photographed each other in cliff ruins, climbing Rainbow Bridge
Rainbow Bridge National Monument
Rainbow Bridge National Monument is administered by Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, southern Utah, USA. Rainbow Bridge is often described as the world's highest natural bridge. The span of Rainbow Bridge was reported in 1974 by the Bureau of Reclamation to be , but a laser measurement in...
, in the Hopi mesas and canyons. The resulting photographs were among the first 35mm images to appear in American magazines.
The Southwest experiences were deeply influential for Barbara Morgan. The stratification of Grand Canyon
Grand Canyon
The Grand Canyon is a steep-sided canyon carved by the Colorado River in the United States in the state of Arizona. It is largely contained within the Grand Canyon National Park, the 15th national park in the United States...
and Monument Valley
Monument Valley
Monument Valley is a region of the Colorado Plateau characterized by a cluster of vast sandstone buttes, the largest reaching above the valley floor. It is located on the northern border of Arizona with southern Utah , near the Four Corners area...
attuned her to geologic time; Mesa Verde Cliff Dwellings to ancient human time. The Navajo and Pueblo Indian tribes through ritual dance displayed their “partnership in the cosmic process” and connected her to the universally primal.
NEW YORK AND THE EAST
In response to the Leica-illustrated articles, E. Leitz, Inc. offered Willard a job publicizing the new 35mm camera. The couple moved to New York City in the summer of 1930. After one year traveling the east with Willard, Barbara set up a printmaking studio in 1931, and Carl Zigrosser of the Weyhe Gallery exhibited her woodcuts and new lithographs of city themes. The impact of the city, masses of people, traffic, buildings and the east, were in counterpoint to her memories of the Southwest. Out of this subject matter, symbolic forms emerged and she began to paint more abstractly, exhibiting her new work in a solo show at the Mellon Gallery in Philadelphia. While at UCLA, Barbara had been offered a scholarship by Dr. Albert Barnes
Albert C. Barnes
Albert Coombs Barnes was an American chemist and art collector. With the fortune made from the development of the antiseptic, anti-blindness drug Argyrol, he founded the Barnes Foundation, an educational institution based on his private collection of art...
, so while traveling the east, she visited his art collection in Merion, Pennsylvania. As a form of study, he allowed Willard and Barbara to photograph his entire collection. While photographing a Sudan fertility icon and an Ivory Coast totemic mask, she discovered that she could make these ritual sculptures seem either menacing or benign, simply by control of lighting. This experience of dramatization of controllable meanings by light manipulation became the prelude to “psychological lighting” of dance for camera compositions.
Barbara Morgan was deeply involved in the American Artists' Congress
American Artists' Congress
The American Artists’ Congress was an organization founded in February 1936 as part of the popular front of the Communist Party USA as a vehicle for uniting graphic artists in projects helping to combat the spread of fascism...
from its inception in 1936 and served as an exhibition committee member during Stuart Davis’
Stuart Davis (painter)
Stuart Davis , was an early American modernist painter. He was well known for his jazz influenced, proto pop art paintings of the 1940s and 1950s, bold, brash, and colorful as well as his ashcan pictures in the early years of the 20th century.-Biography:He was born in Philadelphia to Edward Wyatt...
presidency of the Congress from 1937-1939.
PHOTOGRAPHY
With two young children, Douglas born in 1932 and Lloyd in 1935, Barbara sought a workable way to be both a mother and an artist. To abandon painting in favor of photography promised to be traumatic, but for two saving factors; first, an idea for a future book presented itself, and second, photography does not require the uninterrupted daylight hours as does painting, and one might work at night in the darkroom. Although Barbara had exposed thousands of images, she still did not consider herself a photographer because she hadn’t completed the cycle of developing and printing. She set up a new studio with a darkroom at 10 East 23rd Street, overlooking Madison Square
Madison Square
Madison Square is formed by the intersection of Fifth Avenue and Broadway at 23rd Street in the New York City borough of Manhattan. The square was named for James Madison, fourth President of the United States and the principal author of the United States Constitution.The focus of the square is...
, and began experimenting with the technical and darkroom aspects of photography. Systematically, she learned processing from Willard and worked on other gaps in her technique, chiefly with the 4x5 Speed Graphic and Leica with all lenses. She worked with Harold Harvey as he was perfecting his Replenishing Fine Grain Developer 777, and explored photomontage.
DANCE PHOTOGRAPHY
That same year, Barbara attended a performance of the young Martha Graham Dance Company. She was immediately struck with the historical and social importance of the emerging American Modern Dance movement:
“The photographers and painters who dealt with the Depression, often, it seemed to me, only added to defeatism without giving courage or hope. Yet the galvanizing protest danced by Martha Graham
Martha Graham
Martha Graham was an American modern dancer and choreographer whose influence on dance has been compared with the influence Picasso had on modern visual arts, Stravinsky had on music, or Frank Lloyd Wright had on architecture.She danced and choreographed for over seventy years...
, Humphrey-Weidman
Humphrey-Weidman
Humphrey-Weidman is a modern dance technique based on the theory and action of fall and recovery. It originated in 1928 when Doris Humphrey and Charles Weidman broke away from the Denishawn school and moved to New York City. There they pioneered modern dance in the United States by founding a dance...
, Tamiris
Helen Tamiris
Helen Tamiris was an American choreographer, modern dancer, and teacher.-Biography:A founder of American Modern Dance, Tamiris originally trained in free movement at the Henry Street Settlement. She danced with the Metropolitan Opera Ballet and the Bracale Opera Company before studying briefly...
and others was heartening. Often nearly starving, they never gave up, but forged life affirming dance statements of American society in stress and strain. In this role, their dance reminded me of Indian ceremonial dances which invigorate the tribe in drought and difficulty.”
Morgan conceived of her book project Martha Graham: Sixteen Dances in Photographs (1941)- the year she met Graham. From 1936 through the 1940s she photographed more than 40 established dancers and choreographers, and she described her process:
“To epitomize…a dance with camera, stage performances are inadequate, because in that situation one can only fortuitously record. For my interpretation it was necessary to redirect, relight, and photographically synthesize what I felt to be the core of the total dance.”
Many of these dancers are now regarded as the pioneers of modern dance, and her photographs as the definitive images of their art. These included Valerie Bettis
Valerie Bettis
Valerie Elizabeth Bettis was an American modern dancer and choreographer. She found success in musical theatre, ballet, and as a solo dancer.-Biography:...
, Merce Cunningham
Merce Cunningham
Mercier "Merce" Philip Cunningham was an American dancer and choreographer who was at the forefront of the American avant-garde for more than 50 years. Throughout much of his life, Cunningham was considered one of the greatest creative forces in American dance...
, Jane Dudley
Jane Dudley
For other people named Jane Dudley, see Jane Dudley, Duchess of Northumberland and Lady Jane GreyJane Dudley was an American modern dancer, choreographer, and teacher.-Biography:...
, Erick Hawkins
Erick Hawkins
Frederick Hawkins known as Erick Hawkins was a leading American modern-dance choreographer and dancer...
, Hanya Holm
Hanya Holm
Hanya Holm is known as one of the “Big Four” founders of American modern dance...
, Doris Humphrey
Doris Humphrey
Doris Batcheller Humphrey was a dancer and choreographer of the early twentieth century. Humphrey was born in Oak Park, Illinois but grew up in Chicago, Illinois. She was the daughter of Horace Buckingham Humphrey and Julia Ellen Wells and was a descendant of pilgrim William Brewster...
, Jose Limon
José Limón
José Arcadio Limón was a pioneer in the field of modern dance and choreography. In 1928, at age 20, he moved to New York City where he studied under Doris Humphrey and Charles Weidman. In 1946, Limón founded the José Limón Dance Company...
, Sophie Maslow
Sophie Maslow
Sophie Maslow was an American choreographer, modern dancer and teacher, and founding member of New Dance Group. She was a first cousin of the American sculptor Leonard Baskin....
, May O’Donnell, Pearl Primus
Pearl Primus
Pearl Primus was a dancer, choreographer and anthropologist. Primus played an important role in the presentation of African dance to American audiences. Early in her career she saw the needs to promote African dance as an art form worthy of study and performance...
, Anna Sokolow
Anna Sokolow
Anna Sokolow was a Jewish American dancer and choreographer.-Training:...
, Helen Tamiris
Helen Tamiris
Helen Tamiris was an American choreographer, modern dancer, and teacher.-Biography:A founder of American Modern Dance, Tamiris originally trained in free movement at the Henry Street Settlement. She danced with the Metropolitan Opera Ballet and the Bracale Opera Company before studying briefly...
, and Charles Weidman
Charles Weidman
Charles Weidman is a renowned choreographer, modern dancer and teacher. He is well known as one of the pioneers of Modern Dance in America. He wanted to break free from the traditional movements of dance forms popular at the time to create a uniquely American style of movement...
. Critics Clive Barnes
Clive Barnes
Clive Alexander Barnes, CBE was a British-born American writer and critic. From 1965 to 1977 he was the dance and theater critic for the New York Times, the most powerful position he had held, since its theater critics' reviews historically have had great influence on the success or failure of...
, John Martin
John Martin (dance critic)
John Martin became America’s first major dance critic in 1927. Focusing his efforts on propelling the modern dance movement, he greatly influenced the careers of dancers such as Martha Graham...
, Elizabeth McCausland, and Beaumont Newhall
Beaumont Newhall
Beaumont Newhall was an influential curator, art historian, writer, and photographer. His The History of Photography remains one of the most significant accounts in the field and has become a classic photo history textbook...
have all noted that Morgan’s work is an unmatched testament, document and interpretation.
Graham and Morgan developed a relationship that would last some 60 years. Their correspondence attests to their mutual affection, trust and respect. In 1980, Graham stated:
“It is rare that even an inspired photographer possesses the demonic eye which can capture the instant of dance and transform it into timeless gesture. In Barbara Morgan I found that person. In looking at these photographs today, I feel, as I felt when I first saw them, privileged to have been a part of this collaboration. For to me, Barbara Morgan through her art reveals the inner landscape that is a dancer’s world.”
In 1945, with sponsorship by the National Gallery and the State Department, Morgan mounted the exhibition La Danza Moderna Norte-Americana: Fotografias por Barbara Morgan – 44 panel mounted enlargements, exhibited first at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, before a South American tour.
PHOTOMONTAGE & LIGHT DRAWING
Pushed by her quest to do more with photography, Morgan “began to feel the pervasive, vibratory character of light energy as a partner of the physical and spiritual energy of the dance, and as the prime mover of the photographic process. “Suddenly, I decided to pay my respects to light, and create a rhythmical light design for the book tailpiece.” She described herself as a “kinetic light sculptor,” creating gestural light drawings with an open shuttered camera in her darkened studio.
Although photomontage was enthusiastically practiced in Europe and Latin America in the 1930s and 40s, it was alien to American photography and widely disparaged. Morgan’s knowledge of the European avant-garde, and her friendship with Lucia and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy
László Moholy-Nagy
László Moholy-Nagy was a Hungarian painter and photographer as well as professor in the Bauhaus school. He was highly influenced by constructivism and a strong advocate of the integration of technology and industry into the arts.-Early life:...
, furthered her interest in montage. She was particularly stuck by how the genre could capture the multiplicity of modern American life. She worked with themes of social concern, natural and constructed environments, and human dignity.
SUMMER’S CHILDREN AND BOOK DESIGN
Over the years her great interest in children’s growth inspired many camp, school and college photographic jobs, and her own projects, which culminated in the book, Summer’s Children (1951). Beaumont Newhall
Beaumont Newhall
Beaumont Newhall was an influential curator, art historian, writer, and photographer. His The History of Photography remains one of the most significant accounts in the field and has become a classic photo history textbook...
, of George Eastman House
George Eastman House
The George Eastman House is the world's oldest museum dedicated to photography and one of the world's oldest film archives, opened to the public in 1949 in Rochester, New York, USA. World-renowned for its photograph and motion picture archives, the museum is also a leader in film preservation and...
stated, “Barbara Morgan has made her book of universal appeal. Her sensitive photographs, skillfully combined with words, capture the world of youth with heartiness and tenderness, humor and sympathy. Summer’s Children is a moving interpretation of the magic world of youth.”
Morgan also designed and photo-edited The World of Albert Schweitzer
Albert Schweitzer
Albert Schweitzer OM was a German theologian, organist, philosopher, physician, and medical missionary. He was born in Kaysersberg in the province of Alsace-Lorraine, at that time part of the German Empire...
, by Erica Anderson, Harper & Brothers, 1955, and made the photographs for Prestini’s Art in Wood, for Pocohontas Press in 1950.
CONTRIBUTIONS
Morgan’s life and art were both infused with this profound sense of energy and purposefulness. “I’m not just a ‘Photographer’ or a ‘Painter,’” she asserted, “but a visually aware human being searching out ways to communicate the intensities of life.” She possessed an innate capacity for close associations and lasting friendships with some of the most creative minds of her time, exchanging letters with Edward Weston
Edward Weston
Edward Henry Weston was a 20th century American photographer. He has been called "one of the most innovative and influential American photographers…" and "one of the masters of 20th century photography." Over the course of his forty-year career Weston photographed an increasingly expansive set of...
, Gordon Parks
Gordon Parks
Gordon Roger Alexander Buchanan Parks was a groundbreaking American photographer, musician, poet, novelist, journalist, activist and film director...
, Margaret Mead
Margaret Mead
Margaret Mead was an American cultural anthropologist, who was frequently a featured writer and speaker in the mass media throughout the 1960s and 1970s....
, Buckminster Fuller
Buckminster Fuller
Richard Buckminster “Bucky” Fuller was an American systems theorist, author, designer, inventor, futurist and second president of Mensa International, the high IQ society....
, Joseph Campbell
Joseph Campbell
Joseph John Campbell was an American mythologist, writer and lecturer, best known for his work in comparative mythology and comparative religion. His work is vast, covering many aspects of the human experience...
, William Carlos Williams
William Carlos Williams
William Carlos Williams was an American poet closely associated with modernism and Imagism. He was also a pediatrician and general practitioner of medicine, having graduated from the University of Pennsylvania...
, Dorthea Lange, Stuart Davis
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, Richard Neutra
Richard Neutra
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, and Charles Sheeler
Charles Sheeler
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, among many others. She was a deep and trusted friend of Berenice Abbott
Berenice Abbott
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, Wynn Bullock
Wynn Bullock
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, Minor White
Minor White
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, Ansel Adams
Ansel Adams
Ansel Easton Adams was an American photographer and environmentalist, best known for his black-and-white photographs of the American West, especially in Yosemite National Park....
, and Nancy and Beaumont Newhall
Beaumont Newhall
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. In 1952, Morgan founded Aperture Magazine
Aperture (magazine)
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with Adams, Lange, White and the Newhalls. Morgan exhibited widely, including a second solo show at Museum of Modern Art
Museum of Modern Art
The Museum of Modern Art is an art museum in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, on 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It has been important in developing and collecting modernist art, and is often identified as the most influential museum of modern art in the world...
, New York, and lectured nationally for nearly five decades. She was a guest instructor for the Ansel Adams
Ansel Adams
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Yosemite Workshops in 1970 and 71. At Black Mountain College
Black Mountain College
Black Mountain College, a school founded in 1933 in Black Mountain, North Carolina, was a new kind of college in the United States in which the study of art was seen to be central to a liberal arts education, and in which John Dewey's principles of education played a major role...
, she was on the faculty of Art Summer Institute in 1944 with Walter Gropius
Walter Gropius
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and Josef and Anni Albers
Josef Albers
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, among others. Her numerous articles in journals, her commentaries on art and photography, and her voluminous, lively correspondence have yet to be studied in depth. “How wonderful to behold a person who has developed all of these capacities because of her practice of living as a whole being,” Minor White wrote in the introduction to a 1964 issue of Aperture dedicated to her work.
References
Black Mountain College Bulletin, Art Institute, (Summer 1944)
Carter, Curtis L. and Agee, William C. (1988). Barbara Morgan, Prints Drawings, Watercolors and Photographs. Milwaukee: Marquette University. ISBN 0871002612
Ewing, William A. (1987) The Fugitive Gesture: Masterpieces of Dance Photography. London: Thames and Hudson Ltd.
First American Artists’ Congress 1936, New York City (1936)
Mitchell, Margaretta K. (1979) Recollections: Ten Women of Photography. Viking Studio Book
Morgan, Barbara (1964) Barbara Morgan, Aperture 11:1
Morgan, Barbara (1941)(1980) Martha Graham: Sixteen Dances in Photographs. New York, Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 2nd Ed. Dobbs Ferry, New York: Morgan & Morgan (1980) ISBN 0871001764
Newhall, Beaumont (1952). Magazine of Art. The American Federation of Arts (March 1952)
Patnaik, Deb P. (1999) Barbara Morgan, Masters of Photography, New York: Aperture. ISBN 0893818259
Chronology
- 1988 Awarded Lifetime Achievement Award by American Society of Magazine Photographers, Washington, D.C
- 1978 Included in book and exhibit, RECOLECTIONS: Ten Women of Photography,International Center of Photography, New York.
- 1978 Received honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts, Marquette University, Milwaukee.
- 1977 Created BARBARA MORGAN DANCE PORTFOLIO.
- 1975 Received grant from National Endowment for the Arts.
- 1972 Solo Photography Show, Museum of Modern Art, NY
- 1970 Elected Fellow of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
- 1968-88 Prepared major exhibitions and delivered numerous lectures and seminars.
- 1967 Death of Willard D. Morgan.
- 1961 One-person painting and graphics exhibition, Sherman Gallery, New York.
- 1959 Art archeological trip to Crete, Greece, Spain, Italy, France and England.
- 1945 Solo Exhibition Modern American Dance, Museum of Modern Art, NY
- 1944 Joined faculty of Art Institute, Black Mountain College, NC
- 1942-55 Continued photographic projects and exhibitions. Published second book, Summer's Children: A photographic Cycle of Life at Camp. Picture-edited and designed book by Erica Anderson and Eugene Exman, The World of Albert Schweitzer (Harper & Row, N.Y., 1955)
- 1941 Moved to Scarsdale, New York. Published book, Martha Graham: Sixteen Dances in Photographs. Awarded American Institute of Graphic Arts Trade Book Clinic Award.
- 1935-41 Photographed, exhibited pictures of city themes, dance, children, photomontages and light drawings.
- 1931 Established a studio in New York for painting and lithography. Exhibited graphics at Weyhe Gallery, New York, and other galleries.
- 1935 Son Lloyd was born. Saw Martha Graham perform Primitive Mysteries. Began photographing Martha Graham dances.
- 1934 One-person painting and graphics exhibition, Mellon Gallery, Philadelphia.
- 1932 Son Douglas was born. Continued to exhibit paintings.
- 1930 Moved to New York City. Traveled for Willard's Morgan's Leica Lectures. For study, photographed Barnes Foundation art collection, Merion, Pennsylvania.
- 1928 Willard and Barbara’s interest in modern architecture and design led to meeting Richard Neutra and a lifelong friendship continued. Barbara and Willard photographed construction of Lovell house.
- 1925-30 Joined art faculty, UCLA. Taught design, landscape, and woodcut. Published Block Print Book, containing work of woodcut students. Served variously as writer, managing editor, and editor for Dark and Light Magazine, Arthur Wesley Dow Association, UCLA. Painted and photographed in the Southwest with Willard in the summers.
- 1925 Married with Willard Morgan.
- 1923-24 Taught art in San Fernando High School, San Fernando, California.
- 1919-23 Student, University of California a Los Angeles, majoring in art.
- 1900 Born Barbara Brooks Johnson on July 8 in Buffalo, Kansas. Same year family moved to West Coast. Grew up on peach ranch in Southern California.
Published works
- Martha Graham: Sixteen Dances in Photographs
- Summer's Children (about summer campSummer campSummer camp is a supervised program for children or teenagers conducted during the summer months in some countries. Children and adolescents who attend summer camp are known as campers....
culture) - Barbara Morgan- A Morgan & Morgan Monograph, 1972
- Barbara Morgan: Photomontage, 1980
Awards and recognition
- Lifetime Achievement Award of American Society of Magazine Photographers
External links
- Barbara Morgan - About.comAbout.comAbout.com is an online source for original information and advice. It is written in English, and is aimed primarily at North Americans. It is owned by The New York Times Company....
- Barbara Morgan pages at Temple UniversityTemple UniversityTemple University is a comprehensive public research university in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. Originally founded in 1884 by Dr. Russell Conwell, Temple University is among the nation's largest providers of professional education and prepares the largest body of professional...
- Barbara Morgan works at the Museum of Contemporary PhotographyMuseum of Contemporary PhotographyThe Museum of Contemporary Photography was founded in 1984 by Columbia College Chicago. It is well known for an active program and curating which discovers many emerging and mid-career artists...
- Foundations of Los Angeles Modernism: Richard Neutra’s Mod Squad
- An Unforgettable Photo of Martha Graham, Smithsonian Magazine
- Bruce Silverstein Gallery
- Wach Gallery