Morgan, Barbara (1900–1992)

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Morgan, Barbara (1900–1992)

American artist and photographer who was especially known for her dance images . Born Barbara Brooks Johnson in Buffalo, Kansas, in 1900; died in Tarrytown, New York, in 1992; graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1923; married Willard Morgan (a writer and photographer), in 1925 (died 1967); children: Douglas (b. 1932); Lloyd (b. 1935).

Famous for her innovative dance photographs, Barbara Morgan established herself as a gifted fine artist before taking up the camera in 1930. Her husband, photographer and writer Willard Morgan, had urged Barbara to try photography, but it took the birth of her second child to pry her loose from her paint brushes. "I found that I couldn't take care of two children and paint," she told Franklin Cameron in a 1985 interview for Petersen's Photographic. "I was going crazy being away from my painting, but to my mind and heart, my children came first. My husband, still trying to coax me into photography, finally succeeded. He offered to watch the kids at night so I could work in the darkroom; and on the weekends, when he could again be with the children, I'd go out and shoot whatever I wanted." In 1935, after seeing the Martha Graham Dance Company perform, Morgan became interest ed in recording the dancer's movements in photographs. In her images of Graham, and in her later photographs of dancers Doris Humphrey , Charles Weidman, Erick Hawkins, José Limón, and Merce Cunningham, Morgan not only captured the vitality of the American modern dance movement of the 1930s and 1940s, she also changed the course of American dance photography.

Barbara Morgan was born Barbara Brooks Johnson in 1900 in Buffalo, Kansas, and was raised on a peach farm in Pomona, California. Vicki Goldberg writes that when Morgan was about five, she looked at the picture above her bed and asked her parents how a tree got into her bedroom. When told that it wasn't a real tree but an image created by an artist, Morgan decided then and there that she too would become an artist. Morgan credits her father with alerting her to the organic energy in living forms, energy which later came to dominate all of her work. "[He was] the most stimulating force in my life. He taught how there were millions of atoms in every little thing—and that all the atoms were dancing."

Morgan studied art at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), supplementing her courses with informal work in puppetry and stage lighting. After graduating in 1923, she taught art at the San Fernando High School for a year to support her painting. In 1925, she married Willard, and also began a five-year teaching stint at UCLA, conducting classes in design, woodcut, and landscape. Having the summers off, the Morgans traveled in Arizona and New Mexico, where they indulged their interest in Native American culture. "I always had a strong interest in American Indians; a lingering sense of guilt actually for what we had done to them," Barbara told Cameron. "Participating in their culture was always a poignant experience for me. I was particularly enamored of their dancing. … To me, the Indian dances were primarily spiritual. Their chants were to God, thanking him for the rain and the sun that made the corn grow." She captured the spiritual energy of the ritual Native American dances in a colored woodcut print, Rain Dancers (1931). Two additional works, Primitive Mysteries and Two Primitive Canticles, were also inspired by her visits to the Southwest.

In 1930, Willard's career took the couple to New York, where Barbara's evolution as a photographer began. Her early exhibits reveal a wide variety of subject and techniques, including portraiture, light drawing (tracing images of a light source in motion), and photomontages (in which images are superimposed upon each other). She spent a lot of time experimenting. "Harkening back to my days as a painter," she said. "I was always trying to think of how I could go beyond that obvious click of the shutter. I didn't want my photography to be just an exercise in copycatting." In working with the camera, Morgan also employed her knowledge and respect for Chinese and Japanese art, which she had first experienced as an art student at UCLA. Believing that "art is an abstraction born of understanding the pattern of things," she felt that it was the artist's ultimate responsibility to add to nature rather than "steal" from it.

Morgan's collaboration with Martha Graham began in 1935, after she had seen the then-unknown dancer and her company perform, when mutual friends arranged for the two women to meet. Morgan asked Graham if she had drawn any of her inspiration from Native American dancing. "She said she certainly had: Indian dances were one of her greatest inspiration," Morgan recalled. "Without knowing what I was saying, I said, 'I'd like to do a book on your work.' She answered emphatically, 'I'll work with you,' and we shook hands."

Over the next five years, Morgan worked with Graham and her dance company, observing the dancers in the studio and in performance before attempting to take any pictures. "After I had seen a few experimental performances followed by the final performance, I wouldn't do anything," she told Cameron. "I'd just let the images drift around in my mind. After a week or two I would suddenly remember a gesture—ten, twelve different gestures that epitomized the dance. I'd tell Martha what I thought they were and, you know, we agreed every time." In an article in Dance Magazine, Ernestine Stodelle discusses Morgan's ability to depict "the ecstasy of a gesture," in a dance photograph, using as an example Morgan's image of the vertical jump of three Graham dancers in a work called Celebration as they simultaneously leap into the air. "Kinesthetically at one with them, Morgan explains that she 'clicked at the instant when muscular effort to reach the elevation had been spent and momentary relaxation conveys triumph rather than strain.'" In 1941, Morgan published her stunning volume Martha Graham: Sixteen Dances in Photographs, for which she won the American Institute of Graphic Arts Trade Book Clinic Award.

By the time her book on Graham was completed, Morgan was an integral part of the modern dance scene in both New York and in Vermont, where, in 1938, she was the official photographer of the Bennington College Summer School of the Dance. There she produced some remarkable images of Doris Humphrey and Charles Weidman, who were engaged in some of their most productive work. An exceptional photo of Humphrey in her Passacaglia in C Minor is described by Stodelle as revealing the dancer-choreographer "in a typically eloquent vein of lyricism." Stodelle describes yet another image, the duet from Square Dances, in which "Morgan creates a charming counterpoint of light and shadow by focusing attention on Humphrey's smiling face as she playfully swings away from the tall, lean, shadowy figure of Weidman."

Another of Morgan's successful collaborations was with Mexican-American dancer José Limón, a disciple of Humphrey and Weidman, with whom she had an almost instant rapport. "Because I understood so much about the Southwest, I understood José," she said. Morgan produced three portraits of the dancer in his most powerful solos: "Peon" and "Indian" from Mexican Suite, and his stunning Chaconne. Some of Morgan's most unforgettable dance photographs, however, are of Merce Cunningham, whom she immortalized in one of his own works, the 1944 Root of an Unfocus, and in Graham's El Penitente. Most extraordinary, however, is a shot of a leaping Cunningham in a double-exposure photomontage called Emergence. "Head thrown back, legs tucked under, seemingly aloft in the clouds of a whirling universe, he looks like Shakespeare's Ariel in frenzied flight toward some distant moon," writes Stodelle.

Concurrent with her dance photographs, Morgan continued to produce photomontages and her unique light drawings. ("Light has somehow played a magic role in my life," Morgan once said, recalling that as a child she was so fascinated by light that she would "try to meet the sun.") She also produced a second volume of photographs, Summer Children (1951), consisting of pictures of her own and other children at summer camp. These pictures, taken during the years of World War II, were Morgan's attempt to offer an expression of hope and courage during a difficult time in the nation's history.

During her career, Barbara Morgan had one-woman exhibitions at the Institute of American Indian Art, Santa Fe, the Pasadena Art Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, the George Eastman House, and the National Museum of Dance in Saratoga Springs, New York. The 1991 show in Saratoga Springs was unique in that it brought Morgan's drawings, prints, watercolors, and photographs together in one exhibit. Morgan received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1975, and participated in the Women in Photography exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Art. The artist and photographer continued to work up until her death in 1992. "If I can't continue working, I don't want to live," she said at age 84. "So I work."