Collection 1950s–1970s

Barbara Morgan. Martha Graham, Extasis. 1935 424

Gelatin silver print, 13 1/4 × 10 1/4" (33.6 × 26.0 cm). Purchase

Artist, Barbara Morgan: I never studied photography, I might add. I absorbed it.

As a student at UCLA, I was a major in art, and of course, I painted. And then I also got married to Willard Morgan, and he was more of a photographer. We didn't have very much money, so he set up our darkroom in our bathroom. So, every time I went to the bathroom, I learned about photography. Because there would be negatives hanging and dangling, and there would be prints washing in trays.

By 1932, we decided it was time to have a child. If any of you here have children and want to paint, you'll know how difficult that one was. So I was just in this stage of desperation. So then Willard said, "Now look, Barbara. You are a photographer, you just don't acknowledge that you are. But since most photography is done actually in the darkroom, I could be with the kids at night, and you could be in the darkroom." And so it was that or nothing. Then I began thinking, well, If I ever photograph, my things have got to move.

This was in the period when I was photographing Martha Graham. I said something like, "We were deeply impressed by your beautiful dance." And then, without knowing what I was saying, I said, "I would like to do a book on your work." And she said, "I'll work with you."

I wanted to give a sense of rhythm. I made all kinds of studies of timing. If I wanted to make her skirt terribly intense, I would've shot maybe at a ten-thousandth or a thousandth of a second. But if I wanted it tense but fluent, I probably shot it at six-hundredths of a second. Every gesture is controlled by my awareness of the emotional impact that timing creates.



Television/audio interview with “Barbara Morgan,” from the series “Visions and Images: American Photographers on Photography” (1981), courtesy of Dr. Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel, Interviewer/Producer; audio/video provided by the Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel Collection, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University.