“Barbara Crane”: in Paris, the Center Pompidou pays tribute to the little-known work of the Chicago photographer

Given her experimental audacity and her inventiveness, we wonder why the American photographer Barbara Crane (1928-2019), shown around fifteen years ago in Paris by the gallery owner Françoise Paviot, remained so confidential in France.

We hope that the exhibition, which the Center Pompidou is devoting to the first twenty-five years of his career, so abundant, will repair this incomprehensible oversight. Especially since many of his prints, collected there, often come from private collections, the Museum of Modern Art having only purchased two of his series very recently. And undoubtedly because Julie Jones, curator at the Photography Office of this establishment and curator of the exhibition, was very interested in this extraordinary artist.

From the first room, with Neon Series (1969), we can imagine the photographer’s happiness when she realized that it worked, by superimposing films representing illuminated signs in the city and portraits of visitors to a department store, taken on the spot!

Further, with People of the North Portal (1970), we are first struck by its vast inventory of expressions, postures and gestures of visitors, obtained in the chamber (a heavy and unwieldy piece of equipment, she which only measured 1.56 m), then that it was positioned facing the north entrance of the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry, then by very close-up shots of these passers-by, obtained using a 35 mm camera, as it crossed itself the doors of the museum.

Attentive to human connections

In doing so, and she accumulated some 20,000 photos, she became part of the famous tradition of American street photography. And the viewer feels that one of the concerns of this photographer, who definitely does not choose between documentary ambition and formal experimentation, is to favor the human, to be attentive to the links uniting men.

Another notable series, Loop Series (1976-1978): a very graphic look, bordering on abstraction, posed, thanks to its heavy 5×7 chamber installed in a golf bag on wheels, on the cohabitation of the old and the modern in the Chicago’s historic Loop business district. She will spend two years there. “I was fascinatedshe will admit, by the random layers of textures, tones and planes, mixing with each other to form an explosion of visual excitement. »

The 14 series shown by the Center Pompidou reveal to what extent “there is no Barbara Crane style or an emblematic series, which has undoubtedly worked to its disadvantage, because it resists any classification”believes Julie Jones.

Holy Barbara Crane! Followed very late, while she was raising three children and teaching photography in a high school, Aaron Siskind’s famous courses given at the Illinois Institute of Technology greatly influenced her formal quest, which did not prevent her from ending her life close to nature, in a wooden house on the shores of Lake Michigan…

“Barbara Crane”, exhibition until January 6, 2025, at the Center Pompidou, Paris 4th. FREE ENTRANCE. Rens. : centrepompidou.fr