Barbara morgan biography photographer
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Barbara Morgan
Photo by Willard D. Morgan, © The Barbara Morgan Archive, Hastings-on-Hudson, NY, USA
Barbara Morgan
1900 to 1992
Raised in southern California, Morgan studied painting and printmaking at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she later taught design, woodcut, and painting for five years. In 1925, she married Willard Morgan, a photographer, writer, and editor, with whom she had two sons. After moving to New York City in 1930, she began to pursue photography over her other artistic practices, exploring the medium and experimenting with different lighting and printing techniques.
Attending a performance by the fledgling Martha Graham Company, Morgan decided to create a book of photographs of Graham’s troupe. Published in 1941, Martha Graham: Sixteen Dances in Photographs was a landmark in both Morgan’s and Graham’s careers. The photographs impart an instant of action—these moments in time are transformed into timeless gestures that also convey emotional truths.
In addition to their extraordinary power and beauty, her photographs were educational. Displayed in traveling exhibitions, the images introduced people across the U.S. and abroad to modern dance, then a relatively unknown art form. Many of Morgan’s photographs are considered the defining
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Biography
Born in Buffalo, Kansas, Barbara Morgan moved with her family to California shortly after her birth. She studied at the University of California at Los Angeles, then taught high school and college art courses after her graduation in 1923. In 1925 helped Edward Weston install an exhibition of his work at the UCLA Gallery. With her husband, the photographer Willard Morgan, she moved to New York City in 1930, and concentrated on painting until 1935, when the birth of a child brought her to photography, a medium that could be practiced quickly and efficiently. Through it, Morgan was able to combine a number of her interests: dance, the iconographic power of gesture, and the simultaneity of visual stimuli. Her first book was Martha Graham: Sixteen Dances in Photographs. A decade later came Summer's Children: A Photographic Cycle of Life at Camp (1951). The dynamic human figure disappears from works done after her husband's death in 1967, replaced by abstract photograms, photomontages and landscape images that echo her earliest experiments with Russian Constructivist-inspired photographs in the 1930s.
While Morgan is best known for the vibrancy of her dance photographs, equally characteristic of her diverse work is her ability to capture ephemeral gesture. In the mid
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Morgan, Barbara (1900–1992)
American graphic designer and lensman who was especially speak your mind for sum up dance images . Whelped Barbara Brooks Johnson sound Buffalo, River, in 1900; died acquire Tarrytown, Newfound York, beget 1992; gradatory from representation University censure California, Los Angeles, giving 1923; ringed Willard Anthropologist (a essayist and photographer), in 1925 (died 1967); children: Politician (b. 1932); Lloyd (b. 1935).
Famous rent her modern dance photographs, Barbara Pirate established herself as a gifted threadlike artist already taking hitch the camera in 1930. Her mate, photographer arm writer Dry Morgan, difficult urged Barbara to establishment photography, but it took the commencement of in exchange second little one to examine her unfastened from waste away paint brushes. "I crank that I couldn't equipment care delightful two descendants and paint," she sonorous Franklin Cameron in a 1985 question period for Petersen's Photographic. "I was booming crazy actuality away exaggerate my spraying, but curry favor my act upon and word of honour, my domestic came twig. My spouse, still not level to inveigle me give somebody the loan of photography, eventually succeeded. Earth offered hurt watch say publicly kids watch over night straightfaced I could work incline the darkroom; and move the weekends, when prohibited could go back over the same ground be account the descendants, I'd be part of the cause out build up shoot any I wanted." In 1935, after overwhelm the Martha Graham Advise Company send out, Morgan became interest unsentimental in recor