Barbara Crane

Barbara Crane was born in Chicago on 19 March 1928. After studying art history at Mills College in Oakland, California, and New York University, she discovered photography for herself in the 1960s. In 1964 she showed her portfolio to the photographer Aaron Siskind and became his student at the Institute of Design (formerly known as the New Bauhaus) in Chicago. She began teaching while she was still a student. Crane completed her education with a master’s degree in 1966: her photographic thesis project “Human Forms” examined the human body in an abstract visual idiom. Crane began teaching photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1967. After around ten years of teaching, she became a professor there. Parallel to this, she created series devoted to life in the city as well as facets of nature and landscape photography. As an official photographer of the Commission on Chicago Landmarks, she documented the architecture of her hometown until the end of the 1970s. Numerous grants, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, enabled her to pursue fine-art experiments with Polaroid material, among other things. Barbara Crane continued to work and teach into the 1990s. She died in Chicago on 7 August 2019.