The Centre Pompidou presents the first major monograph in Europe dedicated to internationally acclaimed American photographer Barbara Crane (b. Chicago, 1928 – 2019), whose career spans more than sixty years. The exhibition brings together more than 200 works, some of which have recently been acquired by the Musée National d’Art Moderne. In partnership with the Barbara B. Crane Trust, it focuses on the first 25 years of the artist’s career, featuring hundreds of her major works, many of them never exhibited before. Barbara Crane was the creator of a plural body of work, consistently exploring form and photographic techniques (gelatin-silver and digital prints, Polaroid instant prints, photographic transfers, platinum-palladium prints, color, black and white, etc), as shown in the exhibition’s selection.

Barbara Crane studied Photography and Art History at Mills College (California) and New York University, then became a professional photographer, specialised in portraits. She continued her training with Aaron Siskind, at the Institute of Design in Chicago in the 1960s, then taught Photography at the Art Institute of Chicago from 1967 to 1995. Her work is remarkable for the synthesis it achieves between the American straight photography tradition and a more experimental sensibility, inherited from European avant-garde movements, typical of teachings of the Chicago school. She combines total freedom towards the medium with technical perfectionism, thus setting her apart from her contemporaries. Her photographic approach to the city, Chicago in particular, and its anonymous inhabitants, became truly unique. Both the artistic context in which she evolved, marked by structuralism and conceptual art, and her many influences – from John Cage to Henri Matisse, including choreographer Merce Cunningham and experimental cinema – inspired her practice, dominated by the concepts of sequence and series, accident and discipline.

Though it can be found in many public and private American collections, Barbara Crane’s work remains largely unknown in France. A major retrospective was devoted to her in 2009, presented at the Chicago Cultural Center, Amon Carter Museum in Texas and Griffin Museum of Photography in Massachusetts.