Barbara Morgan

Barbara Morgan (1900–1992) was an American photographer whose pioneering work elevated modern dance to fine art through her metaphorical portraits of performers. Born in San Francisco, she reluctantly picked up photography in the early 1930s at her husband Willard D. Morgan’s suggestion—he was a prominent photojournalist and the first director of MoMA’s photography division—yet she soon found her true calling when she saw Martha Graham’s Primitive Mysteries in 1935.

Over six years of close collaboration, Morgan and Graham created Martha Graham: 16 Dances in Photographs (1941), a landmark book whose images capture the symbolic essence of Graham’s choreography. Morgan approached dance not as documentation but as metaphor: she sought the “inner landscape” of movement, believing that gestures could convey profound emotional truths—an insight Graham praised for revealing “a dancer’s world.”

After 1945, Morgan turned her lens to children, trees, and plants, and explored experimental techniques such as photomontage and light drawing. Her elegant montages and light sculptures appeared in Summer’s Children (1951), her own monograph Barbara Morgan (1957), and Barbara Morgan Photomontage (1973). She exchanged ideas with cultural figures—William Carlos Williams, Margaret Mead, Joseph Campbell, Edward Weston—leaving behind correspondence that serves as a valuable historical record.

Morgan’s photographs were exhibited in solo shows at the Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian Institution, and galleries across the United States and Europe. Through her poetic eye and innovative compositions, Barbara Morgan transformed dance photography into an art form that continues to inspire generations.