Barbara Morgan: Photographs

Curated by Anastasia James

February 10 – July 15, 2018
Seminar Room

Barbara Morgan (1900-1992) was an American photographer best known for her photographs of the modern dance movement from the 1930s and 1940s that display a physical and psychological energy in their evocative richness. Born in Buffalo, Kansas in 1900, Morgan grew up in Southern California. From 1919-1923 she attended the University of California at Los Angeles where she received formal art training based on Arthur Wesley Dow’s principles of art “synthesis,” a method that emphasized that art should be created by elements of composition, like line, mass, and color. In 1925, she joined the faculty and was known as an outspoken advocate for modern art during a time period when her colleagues were more traditionally oriented. During this period Morgan primarily worked in the mediums of drawing, printmaking, painting, and watercolor. She first began to experiment with photography as the result of her marriage to Willard D. Morgan, a writer who illustrated his articles with his own photographs. In 1931, in response to Willard’s illustrated articles, E. Leitz Inc. offered him a job publicizing their new 35mm camera and the couple moved to New York City where Morgan set up a printmaking studio on 23^rd Street. In 1931, she set up a new studio with a darkroom at 10 East 23^rd Street and began experimenting with the technical darkroom aspects of photography in 1931. Morgan was an early member of the Photo League in New York, a group whose members included Berenice Abbot, Walter Rosenblum, Aaron Siskind, Arthur Leipzig, and Lisette Model among many others.

In 1935 Morgan attended a performance of the Martha Graham Dance Company and almost immediately conceived of her 1941 book project Martha Graham; Sixteen Dances in Photographs. She would continue to photograph the company for a decade. In 1945, with sponsorship by the National Gallery and the State Department, she mounted the exhibition La Danza Moderna