Barbara Morgan

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.