Barbara Crane: Private Views

In the early 1980s, Barbara Crane embarked on a series of photographs shot during Chicago's various summer festivals. Using a Super Speed Graphic camera and Polaroid film, Crane waded in close to the revelers, tracking down the details of their clothing, hairstyles and gestures. The images are tightly cropped and condensed and therefore terrifically alive, bringing us viscerally into the crush of people eating, drinking and enjoying the crowd dynamic. Crane's instrument of choice, the Polaroid, is of course admirably up to the task. As she comments, "The quick feedback of the instant picture is in tune with this energetic style of photographing. This immediacy of result shortens the time it would take my ideas to grow visually, technically and emotionally. What takes a summer of work with Polaroid materials would take three years of picture taking and darkroom time to bring my ideas to fruition." An incredible inventory of private gestures performed in public spaces, "Private Views" offers a sun-drenched, sweat-glistening photographic experience. The effect is mesmerizing and intensely compelling, creating a palpable sensuality from image to image, an incredible document--not of a particular event or personalities--but of something less tangible: the public expression of euphoria.

Format: Hardback
Number of pages: 111
Publication date: 2009-02-05
Measurements: 7.2 x 10.2 x 0.6 inches
ISBN: 9781597110969

Barbara Crane studied art history at Mills College, completing her BA at New York University in 1950. In the Institute of Design’s graduate photography program she studied with Aaron Siskind, among others. Her work has been the subject of six retrospectives and more than 76 solo exhibitions. A professor emeritus of photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, she is represented by Stephen Daiter Gallery, Chicago; Higher Pictures, New York; and Galerie François Paviot, Paris.
Barbara Hitchcock is curator and director of the Polaroid Collection in Concord, Maine.