Barbara Morgan

American, 1900 - 1992

BiographyBarbara Morgan (1900-1992) remains best known for her groundbreaking, Modernist photographs of dancers that elegantly captured both the formal beauty of her subjects’ bodies and the “pivotal themes and key gestures” of their choreography. During the 1930s-40s, she photographed many significant figures in the emerging American modern dance movement. Her vibrant photographs of Martha Graham (1894-1991), Merce Cunningham (1919-2009), and many other figures gained recognition as the defining images of these prominent performers.

Raised in Southern California, Morgan studied painting and printmaking at the University of California, Los Angeles (1919-23), where she later taught design, landscape painting, and woodcut printmaking from 1925-30. While teaching at UCLA, she met photographer Edward Weston (1886-1958), whose images introduced Morgan to the medium's artistic possibilities. She began to experiment with photography after moving to New York City with her husband, the photographer and publisher Willard Morgan (1900-67), in 1930 and giving birth to two sons.

Morgan attended an early performance of Primitive Mysteries by Martha Graham’s newly established dance company in 1935. She approached Graham afterward, and the two began a collaboration that resulted in Morgan’s first published photo series: Martha Graham: Sixteen Dances in Photographs (1941). In these pivotal images, Morgan expertly utilized photography’s ability to freeze motion and techniques like photomontage, timed exposure, and double exposure in a studio environment to capture the elegant physicality of Graham’s gestures, positions, and movements. While she also received acclaim for her experiments with photomontage and light, explorations of other photographic subjects including children and nature, and for her painting, Morgan remains best known for her images of dancers, taken primarily between 1935-45.

Morgan’s dance photographs have been exhibited regularly at galleries, museums, and colleges since 1938, exposing a broad audience to the innovative artists that pioneered American modern dance. A traveling exhibition, Dancing Atoms: Photographs by Barbara Morgan, organized by the Syracuse University Art Galleries, was most recently on view at the Asheville Art Museum through May 25, 2020. The recipient of numerous grants and awards, Morgan received a National Endowment of the Arts Grant in 1975, and was honored with a National Achievement Award from the Women’s Caucus in the Arts (1986) and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Photographic Insight Foundation (1991), among other awards. In addition to her work, Morgan was a co-founder of the influential photography periodical Aperture in 1951 with Ansel Adams, Dorthea Lange, and Beaumont Newhall, among others.

Morgan’s photographs can be found in numerous collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Brooklyn Museum; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Art Institute of Chicago; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Detroit Institute of Arts; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Ft. Worth; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; and the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Australia.

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