Heads Up—Slow Down! Julie Jones, curator at the Musée National d’Art Moderne’s Photography Department, cautions the hurried visitor. “Barbara Crane’s works demand your time,” she states in the catalog for the exhibition she curated. “You must fully immerse yourself. To glance through these images quickly is to overlook the intricate internal logic that unfolds from a remarkable sense of wit.”
To the discerning observer, Crane’s photographs unlock the myriad facets of her artistry. From series to series, “her images delve into every possibility presented by photographic techniques,” remarks Julie Jones, who was astounded by the “sheer volume of photos, negatives, and archives” found in the artist’s studio. Photomontages, collages, platinum-palladium prints, Polaroids, digital photography—her portfolio spins a dizzying array of diversity.
The exhibition artfully navigates this abundance by honing in on the first twenty-five years of Crane’s career, which spanned over six decades. Herein lies the temporal focus. As for place, the imagery homes in on Chicago, the artist’s birthplace and muse. She captured its every detail.
One of her most famous series is named after the Loop, the city’s storied financial district. Crane captures its grand architecture in fragments, rendered in stark black and white. She manipulates geometric variations and repetitive motifs—windows, balconies, angles, and curves. She also portrays, through stark contrasts of plane and scale, the silhouettes of an anonymous crowd moving in unison along the sidewalks of this skyscraper forest. The city’s aesthetic force morphs into a haunting mirage.
The scenography also offers more serene interludes, like a tender series of nudes. Confined indoors while she needed to care for her children, Crane turned them into her subjects, even paying them 35 cents an hour for their time posing. Reduced to mere lines, their bodies resemble pencil strokes—a minimalist masterstroke. “Her approach to the nude is radical: faceless, the bodies are refined until almost completely unrecognizable.”
The Centre Pompidou’s selection underscores the pivotal role of Crane’s photographic experiments, honed in the 1960s at the Institute of Design under Aaron Siskind, before she ventured off to carve her own path. “Often compared to other photographers from the Institute of Design in Chicago, such simplification does her a disservice. She knew no bounds, experimenting incessantly,” the curator highlights.
Barbara Crane navigates between documentary photography and formal abstraction. This boundless creativity is apparent in her 1969 “Neon Series”, where she overlays portraits of individuals exiting a department store with vibrant patterns, achieving a potent graphic effect alongside a subtle critique of consumerism. The social undercurrents of her work, though subtle, are perceptible in the kaleidoscopic portrayals of Chicago’s pedestrians in “People of North Portal”.
Julie Jones is particularly moved by this series: “Comprising hundreds of images taken with a tripod-mounted medium-format camera stationed at a major museum entrance in Chicago, it captures a parade of anonymous figures—youths, adults, seniors from all walks of life. The collection also includes intimate close-ups taken by Crane with a Leica as she herself passed through this gateway. The ensemble is visually striking in its simplicity and power.”
Barbara Crane, heralded in her home country as one of the greatest American photographers of the twentieth century, has been celebrated in 90 solo shows and seven retrospectives globally, yet remains largely unrecognized in France. This premiere exhibition at the Pompidou marks her long-overdue celebration in Europe—a recognition that promises to resonate further. According to Julie Jones, “We are just beginning to uncover the breadth of this artist’s work.”
“Barbara Crane” is on view at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, through January 6, 2025.
The exhibition catalog edited by Julie Jones, co-published by Editions du Centre Pompidou / Atelier EXB, is available at €49.
