{"id":6165,"date":"2018-02-27T17:18:56","date_gmt":"2018-02-27T22:18:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/?p=6165"},"modified":"2018-02-27T17:19:08","modified_gmt":"2018-02-27T22:19:08","slug":"barbara-morgan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/2018\/02\/27\/barbara-morgan\/","title":{"rendered":"Barbara Morgan\u2019s Pictures Of Modern Dance Pioneers: The \u2018Greatest Dance Photographs Ever Made In America\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

Barbara Morgan\u2019s photographs of American modern dancers in the 1930s and \u201840s are among the most striking and influential ever made. But she didn\u2019t set out to be a photographer.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you just click the shutter, you are stealing reality! I can\u2019t be a thief. I must create,\u201d she once told her husband.<\/p>\n

Then she became a mother and found she didn\u2019t have the uninterrupted time she felt she needed to continue to pursue her painting and woodcut printmaking. Photography, she figured, could happen faster, in more discrete bites of time. She began to think, \u201cMotherhood and photography could work.\u201d<\/p>\n

Seeing performances by the Martha Graham Dance Company in the mid 1930s, she found the subject for which she is remembered. Longtime New Yorker dance critic Joan Acocella wrote in Smithsonian magazine in 2011: \u201cThe combined ardor of Graham and Morgan produced what\u2014with maybe one competitor, George Platt Lynes\u2019 images of George Balanchine\u2019s early work\u2014were the greatest dance photographs ever made in America.\u201d<\/p>\n

Morgan\u2019s photos are the subject of two new exhibitions. \u201cBarbara Morgan: Dancing Atoms,\u201d<\/a> organized by the Syracuse University Art Galleries and featuring 30 photos spanning from the early 1930 to the \u201860s, is at the Chapel Art Center at Saint Anselm College in Manchester, New Hampshire, through May 5, 2018. \u201cSuspended Gestures\u2014A Photo History Collaboration between Martha Graham and Barbara Morgan\u201d<\/a> at Williams College Museum of Art in Williamstown, Massachusetts, through April 25, features five photos from the institution\u2019s collection.<\/p>\n

\"Barbara<\/a>
Barbara Morgan “Martha Graham-Celebration (Trio),” 1937, gelatin silver print. (Courtesy Williams College Museum of Art)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Help Wonderland keep producing our great coverage of local arts, cultures and activism by contributing to Wonderland on Patreon<\/a>. And sign up for our free, weekly newsletter<\/a> so you don’t miss any of our reporting.<\/em><\/p>\n

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Barbara Morgan (1900-1970) was born Barbara Brooks Johnson in Buffalo, Kansas. She moved when she was nine months old with her family to a peach farm in southern California, where she grew up. The world is \u201cmade of dancing atoms \u2026 and everything in it is whirling and dancing\u2014even if it looks still,\u201d she always remembered her father telling her when she was a girl.<\/p>\n

Morgan studied painting and art history the University of California at Los Angeles from 1919 to 1923 and was particularly struck by non-Western approaches. After graduation, she taught design, woodcut printing and painting at UCLA.<\/p>\n

In 1925, Morgan married Willard D. Morgan (1900-1967), whom she\u2019d known since high school. He was a 6-foot, 7-inch tall man nicknamed \u201cHerc,\u201d as in Hercules, who would write about photography for magazines, edit books on photography, and serve briefly in the 1940s as a photo editor for \u201cLife\u201d and then \u201cLook\u201d magazines and as the first director of photography at New York City\u2019s Museum of Modern Art.<\/p>\n

\"Barbara<\/a>
Barbara Morgan, “Children Dancing by Lake,” 1940, gelatin silver print, 13 \u00bd x 17 7\/8 inches. (Courtesy of the Syracuse University Art Collection)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

While in California, during summers, the couple traveled Utah, Arizona and New Mexico, investigating Native American cultures and making art. She painted, he photographed indigenous ceremonies, artifacts and communities, then wrote articles about their explorations.<\/p>\n

They were visiting the northern California coast in the summer of 1930 so Willard could photograph whales, when a motorcycle messenger tracked them down with a telegraph offering Willard a job in New York working as a promoter for Leica cameras, Michael Shuter reported<\/a> in 1991 and \u201992. Willard had been in contact with the company for two years, using their cameras and writing about the results in articles illustrated with his photos in American Photography and other magazines,<\/p>\n

So they drove to New York City in fall 1930. Morgan continued to focus on painting there until her sons arrived\u2014Doug born in 1932 and Lloyd born in 1935.<\/p>\n

\"Barbara<\/a>
Barbara Morgan, “Third Avenue El,” 1936, Gelatin silver print, 17 x 11 7\/8 inches. (Courtesy of the Syracuse University Art Collection)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Even as a photographer, she was a dedicated modernist artist\u2014playing with superimposing images by photographing reflections in shop windows and experimenting in her studio with abstract photograms, \u201clight drawings\u201d and photomontages. In 1951, along with Ansel Adams, Beaumont Newhall, Dorothea Lange and five others, Morgan co-founded the seminal art photography magazine \u201cAperture.\u201d<\/p>\n

But Morgan remains best known for her dazzling dance photos of the 1930s and \u201840s. Her timing was fortuitous as she got into the circles of American pioneers of modern dance as they were making their early breakthroughs.<\/p>\n

\"Barbara<\/a>
Barbara Morgan, ‘Lamentation,” 1935, gelatin silver print, 12 7\/8 x 17 \u00bc inches. (Courtesy of the Syracuse University Art Collection)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In Morgan\u2019s New York studio, she arranged for Graham, considered by many to be the godmother of modern dance, as well as Merce Cunningham, Doris Humphrey, Erick Hawkins, Jos\u00e9 Lim\u00f3n, Pearl Primus and other pioneers in the field to perform their signature moves. She captured electrifyingly actions\u2014\u201cinstants of combustion,\u201d she said\u2014that still let the choreography shine through.<\/p>\n

\u201cShe was a terror,\u201d Graham later recounted. \u201cI\u2019d do it, and then she\u2019d say, \u2018Well, the dress wasn\u2019t quite right,\u2019 and then we\u2019d have to do it again. First she would make me lie down on the floor and rest. So off came the dress (it mustn\u2019t get dirty, you know), and then we\u2019d start all over again.\u201d<\/p>\n

Morgan\u2019s photos recorded Graham as a zigzag of motion in one of her signature tube-like stretch jerseys in her dance \u201cLamentation.\u201d Morgan\u2019s most iconic shot shows Graham bending parallel to the floor, her right arm pressed to her forehead with emotion, and her left leg kicked up, turning her dress into a rippling arch of fabric.<\/p>\n

Other Morgan photos show three women seeming to fly away from each other in an explosive \u201cstarburst\u201d moment of Graham\u2019s \u201cAmerican Document\u201d and Cunningham rocketing into the air like a fawn. Costumed as \u201cShakers,\u201d Humphrey\u2019s troupe kneels in a circle with heads thrown back and arms up and spread wide. A train of dancers in Charles Weidman\u2019s \u201cLynchtown\u201d hovers frozen, suspended in the air, heads thrown forward, arms and legs flung back.<\/p>\n

\"Barbara<\/a>
Barbara Morgan, “Ekstasis (Torso),” 1938, gelatin silver print, 13 \u00bc x 10 inches. (Courtesy of the Syracuse University Art Collection)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Morgan\u2019s first book was \u201cMartha Graham: Sixteen Dances in Photographs\u201d in 1941. \u201cI wanted to show that Martha had her own vision,\u201d Morgan recalled. \u201cThat what she was conveying was deeper than ego, deeper than baloney. Dance has to go beyond theater. … I was trying to connect her spirit with the viewer\u2014to show pictures of spiritual energy.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is rare that even an inspired photographer possesses the demonic eye which can capture the instant of a dance and transform it into a timeless gesture,\u201d Graham stated in 1980. \u201cIn Barbara Morgan I found that person. In looking at her photographs today, I feel, as I felt when I first saw them, privileged to have been a part of this collaboration. For to me, Barbara Morgan through her art reveals the inner landscape that is a dancer\u2019s world.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Help Wonderland keep producing our great coverage of local arts, cultures and activism by contributing to Wonderland on Patreon<\/a>. And sign up for our free, weekly newsletter<\/a> so you don’t miss any of our reporting.<\/em><\/p>\n

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\"Barbara<\/a>
Barbara Morgan, “Martha Graham: Letter to the World (Swirl),” 1935, gelatin silver print, 13 5\/8 x 15 5\/8 inches. (Courtesy of the Syracuse University Art Collection)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"Barbara<\/a>
Barbara Morgan, “Frontier,” 1935, gelatin silver print, 13 \u00bc x 18 \u00bc inches. (Courtesy of the Syracuse University Art Collection)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Barbara Morgan\u2019s photographs of American modern dancers in the 1930s and \u201840s are among the most striking and influential ever made. But she didn\u2019t set out to be a photographer. \u201cIf you just click the shutter, you are stealing reality! I can\u2019t be a thief. I must create,\u201d she once told her husband. Then she […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6173,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[100,212,110],"tags":[213,307,308,306,305,304],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6165"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6165"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6165\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6245,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6165\/revisions\/6245"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6173"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6165"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6165"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6165"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}