Barbara Morgan (photographer)
| Barbara Morgan | |
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Morgan in 1940
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| Born |
Barbara Brooks Johnson July 8, 1900 Buffalo, Kansas |
| Died | August 17, 1992 (aged 92) North Tarrytown, New York |
| Known for | Photography |
| Spouse(s) | Willard D. Morgan |
| Awards | American Society of Magazine Photographers Lifetime Achievement Award (1988) |
Barbara Morgan (July 8, 1900 – August 17, 1992) was an American photographer best known for her depictions of modern dancers. She was a co-founder of the photography magazine Aperture.
Morgan is known in the visual art and dance worlds for her penetrating studies of American modern dancers Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham, Erick Hawkins, Jose Limon, Doris Humphrey, Charles Weidman and others. Morgan’s drawings, prints, watercolors and paintings were exhibited widely in California in the 1920s, and in New York and Philadelphia in the 1930s.
Barbara Brooks Johnson was born on July 8, 1900 in Buffalo, Kansas. Her family moved to the West Coast that same year and she grew up on a Southern California peach ranch.
Her art training at UCLA, from 1919 to 1923, was based on Arthur Wesley Dow's principles of art “synthesis.” Abstract design was taught parallel to figurative drawing and painting. Art history was taught with significant emphasis on the primitive, Asian, and European artistic traditions. While a student, Johnson read from the Chinese Six Canons of Painting, about “rhythmic vitality”, or essence of life force, described as the artist’s goal of expression. This concept related directly to her father’s teaching that all things are made of “dancing atoms,” and remained a guiding philosophy throughout her life as an artist.
Johnson joined the faculty at UCLA in 1925, and became an advocate for modern art when many of her colleagues were oriented to a more traditional approach to art. She exhibited her drawings, prints and watercolors throughout California. In 1929, Los Angeles Times critic Arthur Miller wrote: “One of the finest sets of prints in the show is that by Barbara Morgan, and these chance also to be the most abstract works here. … Miss Morgan serves it with an aesthetic sauce that is not produced in a casual kitchen. So abstract has she become that we see her taking hints from Kandinsky, arch abstractionist of them all.” In the same year, Prudence Wollet of the Los Angeles Times wrote: “For out and out independence, Barbara Morgan has taken the most liberties yet… I contend that this experimenter bears watching.”
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