With over 200 artworks it is the first major monograph in Europe dedicated to the American photographer
Indistinct silhouettes
cross a deserted square forming a composition of lights and shadows. A face framed by neon lights, absent gaze towards the void. Body fragments fill the whole image, like an abstract plot.
Portraits of people entering and exiting the entrance of a banal building, staged as if in a theatre. This is the work of Barbara Crane (Chicago, 1928-2019), the American artist who revolutionized photography in a career that lasted over sixty years.
BELOVED CHICAGO AND ITS ANONYMOUS INHABITANTS BECOME HER SIGNATURE
Author of a modern and plural work, Barbara Crane has oscillated throughout her life between street photography and experimental practice, immortalizing with the same curiosity the portrait, the architecture of the city, and the nudity of the bodies during the hottest hours of summer. The Centre Pompidou presents the first major monograph in Europe dedicated to the American photographer. The exhibition brings together more than two hundred works, part of which has recently entered the collection of the National Museum of Modern Art in Paris, and focuses on the first twenty-five years of the artist’s career, bringing together some of her main artworks.
Trained in photography and art history at Mills College in California and the New York University, Barbara Crane soon became a professional photographer, specializing in portrait. She continued her education in the 1960s under the direction of abstract photographer Aaron Siskind at the Institute of Design in Chicago, and taught photography at the Art Institute in Chicago from 1967 to 1995.
SHE WAS ABLE TO MAKE UNIQUE EVERY DETAIL OF REALITY BY SUBLIMATING IT IN AN ARTWORK
Author of a heterogeneous work, Barbara Crane has never stopped exploring photographic forms and techniques: gelatin and silver salt prints, digital, instant prints, polaroids, photo transfers, platinum-palladium prints, black and white prints, and, since the 1980s, through color.
Her work is a synthesis between the tradition of straight American photography and an experimental sensitivity. The artistic context in which she works, marked by structuralism, conceptual art, and its many influences (from John Cage to the European avant-garde, through the dance of Merce Cunningham and experimental cinema), influences her poetics, dominated by the idea of sequence and series, randomness, and discipline. The photographic approach to the city, its beloved Chicago in particular, and its anonymous inhabitants becomes her signature.
HER WORK IS A SYNTHESIS OF THE AMERICAN STRAIGHT AND AN EXPERIMENTAL SENSITIVITY
Barbara Crane has made the ordinary extraordinary. Through rigorous technical experimentation and an always curious eye, she has been able to explore new visual possibilities, rendering unique every detail of reality and sublimating it into an artwork.
