In 1951, in a letter to Edward Steichen, then director of the Department of Photography at MoMA, the photographer Carlotta Corpron wrote, "I arrived at pure abstraction in photography through taking hundreds of photographs, realistic and experimental." Corpron was one of twelve women featured in the MoMA exhibition Abstraction in Photography in 1951, along with Lotte Jacobi and Barbara Morgan. Following World War II, it was a matter of ongoing debate whether photography's capacity for representation carried with it a responsibility for humanist engagement, and whether abstraction should remain in the realm of painting.
Gallery label from Making Space: Women Artists and Postwar Abstraction, April 19 - August 13, 2017.