Barbara morgan biography photographer

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-1930s, her choice of abstract photographic styles set her apart from the preponderance of American documentary photographers. Along with Ansel Adams, Beaumont Newhall, Dorothea Lange, and five others, Morgan will be remembered as a co-founder of Aperture magazine in 1951, one of the few publications at the time to nurture a dialogue among photographers and treat photography as a fine art.
Meredith Fisher
Handy et al. Reflections in a Glass Eye: Works from the International Center of Photography Collection

Photo by Willard D. Morgan, © The Barbara Morgan Archive, Hastings-on-Hudson, NY, USA

Barbara Morgan

1900 to 1992

Works by Barbara Morgan

Related Exhibitions

American artist and photographer who was especially known for her dance images . Born Barbara Brooks Johnson in Buffalo, Kansas, in 1900; died in Tarrytown, New York, in 1992; graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1923; married Willard Morgan (a writer and photographer), in 1925 (died 1967); children: Douglas (b. 1932); Lloyd (b. 1935).

Famous for her innovative dance photographs, Barbara Morgan established herself as a gifted fine artist before taking up the camera in 1930. Her husband, photographer and writer Willard Morgan, had urged Barbara to try photography, but it took the birth of her second child to pry her loose from her paint brushes. "I found that I couldn't take care of two children and paint," she told Franklin Cameron in a 1985 interview for Petersen's Photographic. "I was going crazy being away from my painting, but to my mind and heart, my children came first. My husband, still trying to coax me into photography, finally succeeded. He offered to watch the kids at night so I could work in the darkroom; and on the weekends, when he could again be with the children, I'd go out and shoot whatever I wanted." In 1935, after seeing the Martha Graham Dance Company perform, Morgan became interest ed in recording the dancer's movements in photographs. In her images of Graham, and in her later photographs of dancers Doris Humphrey , Charles Weidman, Erick Hawkins, José Limón, and Merce Cunningham, Morgan not only captured the vitality of the American modern dance movement of the 1930s and 1940s, she also changed the course of American dance photography.

Barbara Morgan was born Barbara Brooks Johnson in 1900 in Buffalo, Kansas, and was raised on a peach farm in Pomona, California. Vicki Goldberg writes that when Morgan was about five, she looked at the picture above her bed and asked her parents how a tree got into her bedroom. When told that it wasn't a real tree but an image created by an a

American photographer

Barbara Morgan (July 8, 1900 – August 17, 1992) was an American photographer best known for her depictions of modern dancers. She was a co-founder of the photography magazine Aperture.

Morgan is known in the visual art and dance worlds for her penetrating studies of American modern dancers Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham, Erick Hawkins, José Limón, Doris Humphrey, Charles Weidman and others. Morgan's drawings, prints, watercolors and paintings were exhibited widely in California in the 1920s, and in New York and Philadelphia in the 1930s.

Biography

Early life and education

Barbara Brooks Johnson was born on July 8, 1900, in Buffalo, Kansas. Her family moved to the West Coast that same year and she grew up on a Southern California peach ranch.

Her art training at UCLA, from 1919 to 1923, was based on Arthur Wesley Dow's principles of art “synthesis.” Abstract design was taught parallel to figurative drawing and painting. Art history was taught with significant emphasis on the primitive, Asian, and European artistic traditions. While a student, Johnson read from the Chinese Six Canons of Painting, about “rhythmic vitality”, or essence of life force, described as 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.

Johnson joined the faculty at UCLA in 1925, and became an advocate for modern art when many of her colleagues were oriented to a more traditional approach to art. She exhibited her drawings, prints and watercolors throughout California. In 1929, Los Angeles Times critic Arthur Miller wrote: “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