Snap happy
Everything's coming up roses (and dead birds) for photog Barbara Crane.
When Barbara Crane began teaching at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1967, she tells us, she was only the 12th female professor to be hired by the then-century-old institution. “It was a double whammy,” the gracious 81-year-old photographer recalled recently at her West Loop studio. Referring to the dual challenge of being a woman artist and practicing photography—which wasn’t yet canonized as a fine art—Crane adds, “It was very hard to be taken seriously, in the beginning.”
To understand how seriously the art world takes Crane today, consider that she’s the subject of three current exhibitions in Chicago: “Challenging Vision,” a 60-year retrospective at the Chicago Cultural Center; Stephen Daiter Gallery’s “Private Views—Public Spaces,” which highlights Polaroids Crane made in the early 1980s; and “Barbara Crane: Then/Now—The Eternal Thread of the ID Aesthetic,” a small show at IIT consisting mainly of images from her graduate thesis.
Crane’s not resting on her laurels, however. In fact, though she retired from teaching at SAIC in 1995, she’s not resting, period. When back surgeries and a double knee replacement a few years ago prevented her from spending long hours in the darkroom, she began using a digital camera. At the moment, she’s trying to decide how to photograph a collection of dried roses as well as the dead birds filling her freezer.
The Winnetka native has spent a lot of time photographing roadkill and plants near her country home in southwest Michigan, but she’s not a nature photographer. Her photographs of Chicago landmarks are on permanent display in the Chicago Cultural Center, next to Richard Nickel’s, but she’s not an architectural photographer. Crane’s work resists easy classification. Ever since she paid her children 35 cents an hour to pose for her graduate thesis, Human Forms, the artist has been just as apt to focus on people.
Crane was a single mother of three when, at the age of 36, she entered IIT’s Institute of Design. She supported herself by teaching photography at New Trier High School. “I didn’t get much sleep,” she says. “I’d get up at five in the morning to write up the assignments for my students. I’d work in the darkroom until late, after my kids went to bed. I just worked all the time.” IIT confirmed an interest in conceptual photography that was sparked by modernists György Kepes and László Moholy-Nagy, whom the artist had studied as an undergrad at Mills College.
One of Crane’s innovations was to combine images in double exposures or in contact sheet–like montages such as Whole Roll: Albanian Soccer Players (1975), which appears in “Challenging Vision.” To produce another amazing work in the series, Whole Roll: Pigeons (1975), she lay down in Grant Park, surrounded by birdseed, and photographed pigeons as they swooped over her body. “See, if you want a picture badly enough, you’ll go through a lot,” Crane explains. For “Commuter Discourse,” a 1978 series in “Challenging Vision,” the petite artist withstood hordes of oncoming pedestrians streaming toward Chicago’s train stations at rush hour; she was determined to capture both the crowds and the late-afternoon light.
An obsession with light shapes much of Crane’s work, including Red, Yellow and Orange (1980), a grid of 256 Polaroids. “I was taking pictures of the window shade with the light coming through it…and I wanted to see how the film reacted to different-colored filters,” she says. “As I laid the tests out on the table, I thought, ‘That looks nice! Maybe I’ll do it on purpose.’ Other times, it’s through a mistake that I try something new. I’ve used my mistakes a lot.”
