Crane Takes Flight

Abstract

Crane is a photographer's photographer. Creator of a voluminous and highly influential body of work, she's well known throughout the art world and a true legend in her hometown of Chicago. Although she's not the flashy, big-name artist who might earn a career retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, she deserves one and Barbara Crane: Vision (2009) a thorough look at. her career of more than sixty years, was a good first step. Spanning all manner of technologies, concepts, and genres, the exhibition was a unique look not only at the work of one woman, but at the ideas and technologies that defined the last six decades of photographic history [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Numbering approximately three-hundred photographs, Challenging Vision took viewers on a mostly chronological journey through Crane's career. Entering the Chicago Cultural Center's Exhibit Hall, the spectator began with Crane's most recent work. Coloma to Covert: Softies (2007-09) a mural-sized visual heal lamp, warmed the eyes with large melting pools of softly focused colors of red and orange. It was arresting, and more than an opening palette cleanser--its placement was a clarification: Crane is a working artist. This may have been a career retrospective, but her work is far from over. Crane's earlier work came next. Human Forms,'' a series from the mid 1960s. brought to mind the high-contrast, skewed perspectives of Bill Brandt's nudes. Crane fills the frame with flesh, with our only navigational tool being tire slight, crevasses formed by the body's curves. Crane also photographed life in the streets during this era, blending portraiture and technical experimentation. In Neon Series (1969), Crane shot neon signs then rewound the film to expose it again, resulting in tight facial views of her subject, who are trapped behind giant glowing letters and shape. Visitors exit Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry in her series People of the North Portal (1970 11); by now it: is the early 1970s and the visual differences are chasmic. A bandana-clad hippie chick and a staid nuclear family all pass through the museum doors in the image Descendents of American (1970-71). Beyond the nostalgia of appearances, Crane's series is a typology of human beings lost in personal reverie, living unscripted, quotidian moments. We see how they look, but dwell on who they were. Preserving tradition has never been Crane's aim, and the mid-1970s found her moving beyond single images. Her Whole Roll images, created at various times throughout the 1970s, are just what the title implies: images printed as long strips or grids, repetitive but beautiful contact sheets of simple subjects, foreshadowing the digital revolution that was more than thirty years in the future, her Combines (1974) are contact prints of film sprocket holes, computer data cards, and images of an electrical switching box and train tracks. Here, film and photography my. equated with electricity' and information while the tiny squares on the data card become proto-pixels. Crane began a deep and enduring relationship with Polaroid film in the mid- to late-1970s, and her time spent in the American Southwest led to typical modernist images of cacti, but her most powerful work from the desert evokes people and presence. A somber inventory of grave markers from Papago Cemetery in Arizona shows nine rough, wooden crosses adorned with silk flowers and ribbons--plain but tender remembrances and handmade goodbyes. …