Barbara Crane (1928–2019) was born in Chicago. She studied art history at Mills College from 1945 to 1948 and completed her Bachelor of Arts degree at New York University in 1950. Crane worked as a professional portrait photographer in New York in the late 1940s before moving back to Chicago in 1952. In 1960, she returned to portrait photography when her youngest child entered preschool. A few years later, she enrolled at the Institute of Design and received her master’s degree in 1966 with a series of abstract nudes titled Human Forms.
Crane worked across a wide range of techniques, formats, and materials. Her explorations of sequential imagery included intimate platinum prints, large Polaroids, silver gelatin prints, and digital/archival pigment prints. Her exhibition history includes six retrospectives and more than 75 solo shows since 1966, along with over 200 group exhibitions since 1965.
Among her many awards, Crane received two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships (1974 and 1988), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1979), and Polaroid Corporation Materials Grants (1979 and 1994). Her work has been widely collected and is held in the permanent collections of the National Museum of American Art in Washington, D.C.; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson; the Getty Museum in Los Angeles; the Museum of Modern Art in New York; the High Museum in Atlanta; the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris; the National Museum of Modern Art in Kyoto; the Polaroid International Collection in Offenbach, Germany; and many others.
In 2009, Barbara Crane: Challenging Vision, a major retrospective of her work, was organized by the Chicago Cultural Center and opened at the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, before traveling to other cities. The accompanying catalogue offered the first comprehensive overview of her work and career as one of the most important women photographers associated with the Institute of Design. That same year, Private Views, a collection of intimate Polaroid portraits taken of people in public at point-blank range, was published by Aperture.
Barbara Crane was Professor Emeritus in Photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Other works available upon request.
