Visionary photographer Barbara Morgan’s archives come home to UCLA
Alumna and faculty member praised by Martha Graham for ability to see dance through a ‘demonic eye'
School of the Arts and Architecture alumna, Barbara Morgan, studied at UCLA from 1919 to 1923 and subsequently taught design, painting and printmaking. An archive of her photographs and papers are now housed in UCLA Library Special Collections.
It’s an indelible image and among the most famous dance photographs ever taken: Modern dance icon Martha Graham performing the work “Letter to the World.”
The image helped bring modern dance to the attention of the American people and established the photographer, Barbara Morgan, as one who saw, in Graham’s words, “the inner landscape that is a dancer’s world.”
“It is rare that even an inspired photographer possesses the demonic eye which can capture the instant of a dance and transform it into a timeless gesture,” Graham said in “Martha Graham: Sixteen Dances in Photographs,” a book of Morgan’s work. “In Barbara Morgan I found this person.”
Now, the archives of the visionary photographer, who passed away in 1992, have come home to UCLA, where Morgan studied art from 1919 to 1923 and subsequently taught design, painting and printmaking. She began her career as a painter but embraced photography at the prompting of her husband, Willard, a photographer, writer, educator and curator. Another major influence was Edward Weston, whom she met at UCLA when she was installing an exhibition of his work.
“Barbara Morgan captured the soul of a dance and the dancer like no other,” said UCLA University Librarian Ginny Steel. “We’re grateful to the Morgan family, who selected the UCLA Library to house the collection and made a partial gift of this remarkable body of work.” — Dawn Setzer, May 9, 2016
Read the full article at the UCLA Newsroom website.