Portrait

By her own admission, veteran photographer Barbara Crane takes a ton of pictures. "I never think they are good enough so I keep taking more," she said during a recent interview in her West Loop studio.

Crane has been using a grid-like structure in her work for more than 35 years, and the current exhibition at FLATFILEgalleries presents both old and new images based on that form. For Crane, the grid has been a method of organization as much as an aesthetic choice.Equipment has also been a determining factor. In 1969, Crane started playing around with a half-frame 35mm camera. "I wondered, 'What do you do with all these little pictures?' So I started putting them together and found a new way to work," she says.

In time, using the grid also became a conceptual decision. For years, she sought out heart-shaped rocks on her walks along Lake Michigan knowing that when she had collected enough, she would do a grid.

As a child, Crane helped her father, an amateur photographer, mix chemicals in his basement darkroom; as an art history major at Mills College in California, she was required to learn photography in order to make reproductions of paintings. She was given a one-day class on developing film and a one-day class on printing. Almost immediately, Crane shifted her focus away from art history. "I just needed to do photography," she says. "There was nothing else I wanted to do."

Crane ran a small portrait business in Chicago for a few years before teaching photography at New Trier High School. Then she was hired at the School of the Art Institute where she retired in 1993 after 28 years.

"I loved the students," Crane says. "Once I retired that's the one thing I missed."

Crane is a prolific artist with various bodies of diverse work. She has exhibited extensively and been the recipient of numerous grants and awards including a Guggenheim fellowship. Between 1976 and 1978, Crane dragged a 5x7 view camera around the Loop (the ultimate grid) making more than 500 exposures. In 2002, LaSalle Bank published Chicago Loop,a selection of 40 of Crane's images.

In 1981, The Center for Creative Photography in Tucson mounted a major exhibition, "Barbara Crane: Photographs 1948—1980." If it seems about time for a follow-up, you're right. The Chicago Cultural Center will host a retrospective of Crane's work in 2008.

Crane's most recent work (shown above) began when she mounted the wrong lens on her camera and ended up with circular pictures. "I thought, 'Oh this is nice,' so I've been working within the confines of circles."

Circles within grids, that is.–Ruth Lopez

Barbara Crane: Snap to Grid on view at FLATFILEgalleries