Barbara Morgan American, 1900-1992

Barbara Morgan (1900–1992) is widely recognized for her photographs of the American modern dance movement of the 1930s and 1940s. She did not document performance; she reconstructed it in the studio, working with dancers to find the single gesture that could carry the whole. “I continually sought to discover the fluid relationships of light, time, motion, space and spirit,” she wrote, “by which I could release not the mere record but the essence of dance into the photographic image.” Martha Graham, the American modern dancer and choreographer whose approach to dance and theater revolutionized the art form and influenced dance worldwide, said of Morgan's photographs that they revealed a dancer’s world.

Born in Buffalo, Kansas, in 1900 and raised on a Southern California peach ranch, Morgan came to photography as a painter and never entirely left painting behind. She studied art at UCLA from 1919 to 1923, joined its art faculty in 1925, and exhibited as a modernist painter throughout the decade. In 1929, the Los Angeles Times singled out her prints as the finest and most abstract in an exhibition. Hanging an Edward Weston exhibition that she co-curated at the UCLA Gallery in 1927 convinced her that photography could carry the weight of painting, although she found Weston’s prints too static for her own purposes.

Morgan married the photographer and editor Willard D. Morgan in 1925 and moved with him to New York in 1930. The birth of their two sons, in 1932 and 1935, made painting increasingly difficult and photography possible: Willard cared for the children at night so that she could work in the darkroom. While traveling in the Southwest, she had photographed Native American dance rituals, and when she saw the Martha Graham Dance Company in 1935, she recognized a similar expressive force. Graham later told her that Native American dance had been one of the greatest inspirations of her life.

Morgan approached dance as metaphor rather than record. She studied choreography in rehearsal until she knew precisely when to release the shutter, then brought the dancers into her own studio, where she controlled the lighting. Six years of work with Graham resulted in Martha Graham: Sixteen Dances in Photographs, published in 1941. The book became so sought after that copies were reportedly being stolen from libraries by the 1970s; it was reprinted in 1980. Morgan photographed some forty dancers and choreographers, among them Merce Cunningham, José Limón, Pearl Primus, Doris Humphrey, and Erick Hawkins.

Alongside her dance photographs, Morgan photographed children and city scenes and made photomontages, photograms, and light drawings, while continuing to paint. The light drawings, including Pure Energy and Neurotic Man, were made in a darkened studio by tracing arcs of light with a handheld flashlight during a long exposure, while a strobe captured her hand entering the frame. She was a member of the Photo League and a founder of Aperture. By 1945, she had held solo exhibitions at The Museum of Modern Art and the Mellon Gallery in Philadelphia.

Bruce Silverstein Gallery has presented her work in In Sequence (2025), REWIND (2021), Drawing the Line (2019), Monochrome (2017), Songs and the Sky (2016), Invisible Urges (2013), DISCOVERIES (2010), and Barbara Morgan (2006).