Review
"(Barbara Morgan's) photographs display an energy of both physical and psychic dimensions which clearly echo every aspect of her spirit and insight. The richness and physical scale of her photographs compel us to delve into their every recess and to become a participant in their vitality."--Peter Bunnell
Book Description
Barbara Morgan was a remarkable pioneer in photography. Although she has been most celebrated for her extraordinary studies of modern dance in the late 1930s and early forties, her entire artistic career was fluid, searching, and embraced a wide range of philosophical and aesthetic influences. Morgan captured, through a variety of photographic processes, a new, enduring, understanding of what it means to dance. Her studies of pioneering dancers such as Martha Graham, Jose Limon, Erick Hawkins, and Merce Cunningham, have created a body of images that capture for posterity the spiritual essence of a temporal art. A former painter, she used montage and manipulated imagery to express the visual and kinetic energy of New York City. Combining photograms and light drawing, she experimented with moving light patterns to denote an ethereal momentum.
Included in this volume are the finest examples of Morgan's vision: her dance photographs, photomontages, light drawings, and other works from her long and varied photographic career. In the accompanying essay, Deba P. Patnaik, photo-historian and art critic, provides and overview of the development of her career, and unique insight into the deeply held beliefs that informed her work.
About the Author
Barbara Morgan was born in 1900 in Buffalo, Kansas. Her early training in painting and printmaking at the University of California at Los Angeles lent her photography a dynamically graphic and expressionistic quality. Utilizing a wide range of experimental techniques, she constantly strove to portray the essential qualities of her subject matter--whether she was photographing dance, her children, nature, or the urban landscape. Her explorations with photomontage and light drawings were unique to the American photography of her time, and her documentation of American modern dance has left us with a vibrant legacy of an emergent dance form.
Barbara Morgan FROM THE PUBLISHER
Barbara Morgan was a remarkable pioneer in photography. Although she has been most celebrated for her extraordinary studies of modern dance in the late 1930s, and early forties, her entire artistic career was fluid, searching, and embraced a wide range of philosophical processes, a new, enduring understanding of what it means to dance. Her studies of pioneering dancers such as Martha Graham, Jose Limon, Erick Hawkins, and Merce Cunningham, have created a body of images that capture for posterity the spiritual essence of a temporal art. Included in this volume are the finest examples of Morgan's vision: her dance photography, photomontages, light drawings, and other works from her long and varied photographic career. In the accompanying essay, Deba P. Patnaik, photo-historian and art critic, provides an overview of the development of her career, and unique insight into the deeply held beliefs that informed her work.
Art & Photography
Book Info
