by Curtis L. Carter



A GREAT PHOTOGRAPH seems to arrest time.
It permits the viewer to be ‘born to the instant’—the Now.
In a great photograph the image is never static, whether it
be a leaf, a child’s head, a dancer in motion—
it is all vibrant with Life.

It permits time for participation through the image which
captures that mystery, that—is Life.

This seems to me to be the essential greatness of Barbara Morgan’s photographic images—initial honesty, tireless skill,
and reverence for life makes her essential greatness.1

—Martha Graham


Barbara Morgan (1900-1992) was trained as a painter at UCLA in the 1920s and, from the beginning, was inclined to explore the rhythmic motions of her subjects. She was early on attracted to modern art. In a 1926 Los Angeles Sun Times article, Morgan wrote: “Modern art when at its liveliest is a movement of discovery of the new beauties and new poignancies of our own age and of all ages….we owe ourselves the creator’s thrill of leaping into this search.”2 It is not surprising, therefore, that she was attracted to the developing field of modern dance. In the United States beginning in the 1920s modern dance, perhaps more than any other art form, provided artists with fresh ideas to explore. Photography, too, was ripe for experimentation through manipulated images of photo-montage or prints made by overlapping multiple images in the printing stage, light drawings using photographic processing and other constructed forms of image-making.

Morgan had experienced the ritual dances of Native Americans in the Southwest during her travels in the 1920s with her husband Willard Morgan, a writer-photographer and the first curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.3 As she had not yet been convinced that photography could be an art form, she recorded her experiences of Native American dancers with pen and brush in works such as Rain Dancers, 1931. This piece was inspired by her 1928 visit to a Tewa village in the Hopi Indian territory of New Mexico where she was granted permission to observe Kachina dancers performing a day long rain dance.4 Morgan’s Rain Dancers captures the energy of six masked costumed figures in full motion, and reveals her keen eye for motion and her ability to translate the energy of the dancers to a two dimensional form.

Photographing dance provided an ideal venue for applying the concept of “rhythmic vitality” which became a central idea in Morgan’s aesthetic. Rhythmic vitality is similar to what Gestalt psychologist Rudolf Arnheim might characterize as the dynamic forces that describe the structural orders of feeling and visual perception that link our mental processes with the material world.5 Morgan initially discovered this concept in the Chinese Six Canons of painting. She learned from the Chinese that the goal of artistic expression is to present the essence of life force. Morgan viewed rhythmic vitality as the central concept permeating all of her artistic efforts.

Morgan’s interest in photographing dance blossomed after she moved to New York in 1930, where she met the choreographer Martha Graham in 1935 and began photographing Graham’s work in 1936.6 Graham was choreographing and performing there and was on the way to becoming a leading modern dance creator. The two found a common artistic and spiritual ancestry in their love of the Southwest Indian ritual dance, and in their common New England Puritan ancestry. They felt a strong artistic rapport, and Morgan agreed to photograph Graham’s dances for presentation in a book. The shoots were preceded by conversations between the two, and hours of Morgan observing the dance works in actual theater performances. While watching the performances, Morgan selected particular moments from the flow of peaks and repetitions throughout the dance which, to her, captured the essence of the dance. Working with Graham and the dancers, she recreated these moments in the studio and based her photographs on the results.

Morgan and Graham also shared a common understanding of the Japanese aesthetic concept Esoragoto, which requires that the artist psychologically become whatever is being painted or performed. Morgan had learned the concept from a Japanese painting student, while Graham had studied with Japanese dancer Michio Ito. “When we worked together, and I’d be setting up my lights and she’d be doing her performance make-up, we wouldn’t talk. When both of us were ready we’d lift a hand, and then we’d go and sit on the floor at quite a distance while we were “becoming” what we were going to be and do. And then we’d lift a finger and that was it and then we’d do it.”7 The same process that enabled Graham to become the character in the dance enabled Morgan to “become the spirit of the dancer” and enter into the mood of the dance.

The importance of photography to dance is reflected in Martha Graham’s own words: “The only record of a dancer’s instrument is his body bounded by birth and death. When he perishes his art perishes also….The work of an individual can be explained, criticized, or eulogized by means of the written word….Photographs present more tangible evidence of a dancer’s career. Photographs, when true to the laws that govern inspired photography, reveal fact of feature, bodily contour, and some secret of his power.”8

The book, Martha Graham: Sixteen Dances in Photographs itself a model of creative design engineered by Morgan, was begun in 1936 and first appeared in 1941 at the time of World War II.9 It included Graham’s major works to date such as Lamentation, 1930, Primitive Mysteries, 1931, Ekstasis, 1933, and American Document, 1938. All of the photographs for the book were created in Morgan’s studio with special lighting which she designed. Morgan approached the design of her book with as much care as making the photographs. “It is for the control of visual semantics that I do my own book design, for who could know the implications I feel when intuitively making the original pictures?” she asks.10

In the words of dance critic Deborah Jowitt, “Morgan designed the layout of the book to create a semblance of flow….Events appear in the order in which they occurred in the dance...”11 In ten or fewer photographs for each dance, Morgan’s Sixteen Dances “charts in a skeletal way Graham’s altering approach to group choreography, moving from stark, intense pieces like Primitive Mysteries and American Provincials toward works in which passionate ideas were less subject to a process of abstraction.”12 This book, together with the original photographs, has become the definitive resource for documenting the choreography of Graham.

Morgan was undaunted by the challenge posed in Graham’s extraordinary dance images, and soon began photographing other modern dancers as well. She understood the difficulty of using still photography to convey thematic emotionally charged dance movement. Nevertheless, she set out to capture the drama and spiritual energy that gave expression and meaning to the dances. Her solution can best be described in her own words: “In order to convey the meaning and the form of each dance, I have worked for pictures, which contain the essential emotion of that dance. Such work is a kind of translation….My pictures are designed to arrest time and to capture the dance at its visual peak….The dance photograph must therefore select the most pregnant moments for emphasis and make photographic use of lighting, scale and perspective. Yet it must not exaggerate or betray the spirit of the dance in the interests of sensational photography.”13

Her solution to conveying essential elements of the dance is to focus on the peaks of emotional intensity that actually carry the dance. Morgan notes that, “After absorbing as much as possible, I find that certain gestures remain vividly fixed in my memory and come to symbolize the whole dance.14 She then translates these vivid images acquired spontaneously into photographic language. The challenge is to capture a twenty minute dance in a half dozen or so still black and white photographs. A substantial amount of experience both personal and technical, is condensed into Morgan’s process.

Initially, Morgan drew upon her youthful experiences with the dramatic effects of lighting in an experimental theater in Los Angeles and her observation of the economy of simplified gesture in puppetry. The puppet, she observed, has to express with a single gesture what a dancer or actor would do with several gestures. From these experiences she learned to isolate the pivotal themes and the key gestures expressed in the dances and condense an entire dance of twenty minutes or more into ten or fewer photographs. Thinking experimentally and talking with Graham, while seeing numerous performances of the dances to be photographed, observing rehearsals, exercises and classes, enabled Morgan to see that the actual statement of themes in the temporal arts is brief. Yet, to establish empathy with audiences much repetition and elaboration of the themes is required.

Morgan describes her working process in these words: “When I first began, some people would say, ‘do it in performance.’ I would go to performances, of course. I’d try to so, so that I understood what they were trying to do. First I’d always talk to Martha or whoever and get the philosophy, what had inspired them in the first place to do the dance, what they were really trying to say with it. Then I would try to go to a big theater, a small theater, different kinds of spatial balancing to see how it coordinated…Then I would do nothing. I would not be intellectual. I’d let these memories float around in my mind. There’d be a time when the essential meanings would begin to take form in my mind. What was happening was that the repetition that goes into every theme would disappear and the one punch line would come out that would…the theme, and until that happened I wouldn’t do anything.”15

As a modernist, Morgan was “concerned with exploring her medium as well as with revealing the essence of her subject.”16 On the technical side, Morgan conducted motion-time studies and experiments with psychological lighting.17 Morgan explains her approach to lighting and formal composition in these words: “I work as a kinetic light-sculptor….I think of the bodies in their space as a series of convex and concave forms in rhythmic movement. I send light upon these forms, making patterns of light tones, middle tones, and dark tones; over convex heads, backs, breasts, thighs, bent knees; a concave eye socket, undercut jaws, armpits, knee recesses, etc.”18 To accomplish the task of capturing the essence of the dance in her photographs using these methods, Morgan chose to re-stage and re-light the dances in her own studio space or on a stage reserved solely for the purpose of her photographing. From the shoots come many images of the dance from which to build a set of actual working negatives to process and print. She used a 4 x 5-inch Graflex, an Ikonta B, and a Model A Leica. She varied the speed for differences of 1/50-1/100-1/200-1/500-1/1000-1/10,000 according to the emotion and movement.19

As an historical note, Morgan’s dance photographs were shot in her studio on Twenty-Third Street in New York, in Columbia University’s MacMillan Theater, and the Historic Henry Street Settlement House, and after 1941, in her studio on Highpoint Road in Scarsdale, New York. The Twenty-Third Street studio, located nearby her home at 1 Lexington on Gramercy Park, could accommodate up to a trio of dancers. For dances of larger groups she used the two theaters located at Columbia and the Henry Street Settlement. Morgan carried along and set up her own lighting when photographing in these places.

In 1938 Martha Hill (c.1901-1995) invited Morgan to come to the Bennington College Summer School of Dance in Bennington, Vermont where she served as official photographer to document the dance projects including rehearsals, classes and performances during a two to three week residency.20 The 1938 Bennington Dance Festival brought to a close a five year project and was cited by New York Times dance critic John Martin as the “most brilliant of its annual festivals.”21 The Bennington School, in 1938, hosted four resident artists with their companies that summer: the companies of Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, Charles Weidman, and Hanya Holm. Bennington provided a setting where the choreographers could experiment and develop new work. Graham’s American Document, Humphrey’s Passacaglia, Holm’s Work and Play, and Weidman’s Opus 51 were all done at Bennington in 1938.

Morgan shot the dance rehearsals and numerous informal photographs, some of which are included in the exhibition. She did little or no actual photographs there, as the Bennington setting allowed neither lighting and background nor time in the busy dancer’s schedules for serious photographs. Consistent with her philosophy that photography was an art that could not be realized successfully in the lighting and environment of live performance, or without lighting and background controlled by the artist, Morgan did not attempt to shoot finished works in the raw environment provided by the Vermont setting. Instead, she mainly used this time to familiarize herself with the intricacies of the dances and the dancers in preparation for her artistic efforts.

Based on what has been said previously, it is clear that Morgan is not concerned with literal documentation of the dance. A photograph is not a dance, but answers first to the laws of the photographic medium. Using “light and shadow, sculptural action, shutter rendering, light-created space effects, psychological illusion created by camera angle, and other photographic elements,” the artist photographer aims to enhance the experience of the dance through photographic means.22 Unlike the dance, which allows for presenting a theme sequentially in time and space, the picture must simultaneously condense the dynamic spatial and temporal dimensions into a single two-dimensional fixed image. To qualify as a work of art, a photograph must show an aesthetic state grounded in the creative imagination of the photographer, or the result is less than the dance. Says Morgan, “I am after that instant of combustion, when all the energies of the spirit are wonderfully coordinated with the actions of the body.…impelled by certain emotions, moving in certain rhythmic tempo through space with convincing memorable beauty.”23 How to achieve this result is never a formula.

The photographs of this period are of great interest to dance history and to performers today who try to recreate the dances of the past. They are especially important as documents of the stages of fresh movement being generated in the bodies of Graham and other dancers before the works are actually codified as repertory pieces. In some instances, they are the only remaining record of the works.24 Of course, the historians and dancers who use Morgan’s photographs have the reverse problem of the photographer who distills the dances by observing the performances. The interpreter of the photographs must study the photographs in order to unpack the energy and movements condensed by the photographer’s image, and recreate from imagination what took place in the structure of the work and the dancer’s bodies in-between the peak moments recorded by Morgan’s photographs.

The 2004 Haggerty Museum exhibition of Barbara Morgan photographs differs in its exclusive focus on the dance, from earlier exhibitions of her work at Marquette University, Brooks Memorial Union in 1977 and at the Museum in 1988. The 1977 exhibition provided an overview of all categories—portraits, nature, children, abstract photomontage, dance, and discarded junk.25 In 1988, the Haggerty presented a retrospective exhibition of Morgan’s prints, drawings, and watercolors along with a selection of the photographs.26

Images selected for the current exhibition are drawn mainly from a recent visit to the Barbara Morgan Archives where literally thousands of negatives, contact prints, and rolls of film from throughout Morgan’s photographic career remain. The archives include images selected by the artist for printing and also the negatives, contact prints, and copy prints of those not selected. It is important to note that some of the images presented here are intended to document her working process. Morgan would not necessarily have considered the working prints as final art photographs; yet they provide a rich resource for study of Morgan’s approach to composition. It is evident from this visit to the Morgan archives that Morgan’s photographs cover much more than the familiar images of Martha Graham.

The current exhibition reveals a much richer source for documenting the modern dance of the 1930s and 1940s than is apparent from the well known images such as Morgan’s Martha Graham The Kick from Letter to the World, 1940. Although her principal collaboration took place with Martha Graham, she worked closely with other modern choreographers and dancers. Doris Humphrey, Erick Hawkins, José Limón and Charles Weidman are among the most familiar names. Morgan came into close contact with these dancers at the Bennington College Summer School of Dance. As Morgan recalled in a seminar at the University of Wisconsin Madison in1976, “Charles Weidman was dominantly whimsical, but also profound and Doris Humphrey was lyrical, imaginative and philosophical. I didn't philosophize with them as much as I did with Martha Graham and José Limón, though I had great admiration for their creativity and their interpretations of life's spectrum of comedy to tragedy with countless playful explorations in between.”27 She felt a special empathy with the Mexican-American choreographer-dancer Limón, a Conquistador descendent whose Mexican background complemented her appreciation of the Southwest and generated mutual aesthetic interests.

There were others: Merce Cunningham, Hanya Holm from Germany, Louise Kloepper, Helen Tamiris, Daniel Nagrin, Sophie Maslow, William Bales, May O’Donnell, Pearl Primus, Jane Dudley, Anna Sokolow, Marian Van Tuyl, Valerie Bettis, Jean Erdman, Eleanor King, Katherine Litz, Katherine Bolland, Miriam Blecker, Marjorie Mazia, Frieda Flier, Ethel Butler, Helen Priest Rogers, Pearl Lang, Nina Fonaroff, Letitia Ide, Beatrice Seckler, Si-lan Chen, Barbara Livingstone, Frances Sunstein, Al Bezar, Ray Hamilton, and others all of whom appear in Morgan’s repertory of dance photographs, either in the group pieces or as individuals.

Among the gems reprinted here, some perhaps for the first time, are 8 x 10 in. working prints of the largely forgotten dancer Louise Kloepper, the lead dancer in Hanya Holm’s group. New York Times critic John Martin refers to Kloepper’s appearance in the 1938 Bennington season as “the emergence of a brilliant young dancer among the fellows….She has a highly distinctive style and ability to command attention which belongs to so few young dancers. There seems to be no limitations to her range of movement and whatever her immediate manner there is always beneath it a sense of substance and continuity.”28 Of special interest is a series of solo images of Kloepper taken by Morgan during her stay at Bennington in 1938. Vintage 4 x 5 in. contact prints also reveal Morgan’s working process in images of Doris Humphrey in her dances, Inquest and Shakers. Similarly vintage contact prints of solo dances with Erick Hawkins and Merce Cunningham made in 1942 reveal Morgan’s interest in light and movement.

Other notable informal images offered here are a portrait of the young Morgan, informal images of Graham taken at Sarah Lawrence and Bennington, and a picture of Louis Horst (1884-1964), a visionary composer and teacher during the modern dance era from the 1920s to the 1960s.29 Horst composed modern music for Graham and other modern dancers also taught pre-classical and modern dance.

There remains a mountain of work on the dance photographs of Barbara Morgan. This brief catalogue will hopefully increase awareness and access to the dance images of one of America’s major interpreters of American modern dance among the public. To scholars concerned with both photography and modern dance it offers an invitation for further research.30

1. Courtesy of Barbara Morgan, 1989.
2. Barbara Morgan, “Modern Art,” Los Angeles Sun Times (June 13, 1926): 4-9.
3. Letter to Willard Morgan from John E. Abbott, Executive Vice-President of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, dated June 6, 1943. Courtesy of the Barbara Morgan Archives.
4. Ernestine Stodelle, “Barbara Morgan: Emanations of Energy,” Dance Magazine, LXV No. 8, (August 1991): 46. Review of the exhibition, “Barbara Morgan: Drawings, Prints, Watercolors, and Photographs,” curated by Curtis L. Carter and William C. Agee, organized by the Haggerty Museum of Art, Marquette University, Milwaukee, September 29-November 27, 1988, with additional showings at Davison Art Center, Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut; Center for Creative Photograph, Tucson, Arizona; Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, New York, and the National Museum of Dance, Saratoga Springs, New York. Rain Dance is one of several images created from Morgan’s visit to New Mexico. Another called Kachina Dance Memory was exhibited in the 1929 annual of the California Watercolor Society held in the Oakland Art Gallery and reproduced in the Oakland Tribune, Sunday July 1929.
5. Rudolf Arnheim, “Dynamics,” Art and Visual Perception: The New Version, (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1974): 416-19.
6. Morgan states in the introduction to Martha Graham: Sixteen Dances in Photographs (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1941, First Revised Edition, Dobbs Ferry, New York: Morgan & Morgan Inc., 1980) that her first photographs of Martha Graham were taken at a New York Guild Theater rehearsal in 1936. However, there is inconsistency in the dating of the photographs. For example, “Lamentations” in the exhibition is dated 1935/1980, indicating a dating prior to 1936.
7. Interview with Barbara Morgan, 1979. See also “Discussion With Barbara Morgan,” edited by Curtis L. Carter, Growth of Dance in America, Arts in Society, Summer-Fall, 1976, Vol. 13 No. 2: 273.
8. Martha Graham, “Dancer’s Focus,” in Morgan, Martha Graham: Sixteen Dances in Photographs, pp. 10-11.
9. Barbara Morgan, Martha Graham: Sixteen Dances in Photographs. The plates for the 1941 version were accidentally lost, and Morgan reconstructed the book from her original negatives. Brief new statements by Martha Graham and Louis Horst with an updated chronology were added to the essays of George Beiswanger and Morgan in the 1980 edition. See Deborah Jowitt, “Books: Morgan Looks at Graham,” Ballet Review 9:1, (1981): 109-112.
10. Barbara Morgan, “Learning Experiences,” Aperture 11:1 (1964): 21.
11. Deborah Jowitt, “Books: Morgan Looks at Graham,’ Ballet Review 9:1, (1981): 111.
12. Jowitt, p. 111.
13. Morgan, “Dance Into Photography,” in Martha Graham: Sixteen Dances in Photographs, p. 12.
14. Morgan, Martha Graham: Sixteen Dances in Photography, pp. 149, 150. The philosopher John Dewey describes a similar phenomena in his account of sculpture: “Sculpture communicates the sense of movement with extraordinarily delicate energy….But it is movement arrested in a single and enduring poise….A sense of time is an inalienable part of the nature of sculptural effect….But it is sense of time suspended, not in succession and lapse.” John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Capricorn Books, 1958), p. 234. Morgan had met Dewey at the Barnes Foundation in Merion, Pennsylvania while she was photographing the Barnes collection of art.
15. Interview: Bennington Summer School of the Dance Project: Barbara Morgan, Manuscript, Theresa Bowers for the Columbia University Oral Research Office, December 17, 1978. Quoted with the permission of the Barbara Morgan Archives. See also "Discussion With Barbara Morgan," edited by Curtis L. Carter, Growth of Dance in America, Arts in Society, Summer-Fall, 1976, Vol. 13 No. 2: 273. Here, Morgan offers a similar account of her working relationship with Graham.
16. Jowitt, p. 110.
17. Morgan, “Dance into Photography,” in Martha Graham: Sixteen Dances in Photographs, pp. 150-2.
18. Barbara Morgan, “Dance Photography,” U.S. Camera , No. 8, (February-March, 1940): 52.
19. In a 1953 article in Aperture, No. 4: p. 21, “Kinetic Design in Photography,” Morgan comments on the production of her action photographs. “The 4x5 Speed Graphic and Leica are my cameras for action work. Pressed to cheekbone and eye socket, they are a part of me with minimum lag in shooting. The 1/1000 second shutter speed serves most needs. The Speed Graphic is my choice when the pictures are to be built with light as are the dance photographs for my book, Martha Graham and other work in that field. To create the dramatic lighting in keeping with the subject I use synchro-flash lighting, sometimes with flood light accompaniment. Only the most frenzied movement is shot with speed –light, for I scrupulously gauge shutter time to movement time except in special exceptions. To over-shoot a movement is to make it another movement.” In a hand written note aside this quote, Morgan added: “Not entirely accurate—I vary the speed for differences of 1/50, 1/100, 1/200, 1/500, 1/600, 1/800, 1/1000, 1/10,000 sec. According to the emotion and movement.” A note in Morgan’s handwriting found in the personal copy given to Curtis L. Carter, of the catalogue by Leonard N. Amico and Stephen Robert Edidin, The Photographs of Barbara Morgan (Williamstown, Massachusetts: Williams College Museum of Art, 1978), beside the above text quoted in this work, p. 15.
20. Martha Hill was the founding director of the summer programs in dance at Bennington (1934-1942) and was a major force in the development of modern dance and dance education. She was a member of the Graham company from 1929 to 1931, and served at various institutions including the Juilliard School 1951-1985. International Encyclopedia of Dance, Vol. 3: 363-4.
21. John Martin, “The Dance Cycle Ends: Bennington Festival Concludes Five-year Schedule—New Works Presented” The New York Times, (Sunday, August 14, 1938): 8X. The festival featured four leading dancers and three fellows chosen from among the more talented younger dancers. Among the featured works of the four leading dancers were Charles Weidman’s Opus 51, Martha Graham’s American Document, Hanya Holm’s Dance of Work and Play and Dance Sonata, and Doris Humphrey’s Passacaglia and Variations and Conclusion. Louise Kloepper, one of the fellows and a member of Holm’s company, performed Statement of Dissent and Romantic Theme. Eleanor King’s group composition, Ode to Freedom, and Marian Van Tuyl’s In the Clearing was also cited by Martin. Martin reported that every performance was completely sold out, even with two identical performances, and that many visitors were turned away.
22. Barbara Morgan, “Photographing the Dance,” in Graphic Graflex Photography, edited by Willard D. Morgan and Henry M. Lester (New York: Morgan and Lester, 1947), p. 218, reproduced by the Barbara Morgan Archives, Morgan & Morgan Dobbs Ferry, New York, n.d.
23. Morgan, “Dance Photography,” US Camera, No. 8 (February-March 1940): 52.
24. Deborah Jowitt has remarked that Morgan’s pictures are virtually all that is known of Graham’s Harlequinade, Ekstasis, Celebration, Deep Song and others. See Jowitt, p. 111.
25 Curtis L. Carter, Barbara Morgan Exhibition of Photography, President’s Exhibition October 2-30, 1977, Marquette University, Milwaukee, WI.
26. Curtis L. Carter, Barbara Morgan: Prints, Drawings, Watercolors & Photographs. exh. cat. with essays by Curtis L. Carter and William C. Agee, (Milwaukee, WI: Haggerty Museum of Art, 1988).
27. "Discussion With Barbara Morgan," edited by Curtis L. Carter, Growth of Dance in America, 273.
28. John Martin, The New York Times, Sunday, (August 14, 1938): 8 X.1. Kloepper later went on to serve as professor and chair of the dance department at the University of Wisconsin, Madison (1946-1975), co-chair (1954-1962), chair (1963-1970)
29. Louis Horst developed original music for modern dance and was influential in encouraging modern dancers to use twentieth-century composers in their work. He was an important collaborator with Graham and other modern dancers and an influential teacher of dance-composition at Bennington College, Sarah Lawrence, Columbia University, Juilliard School, and the American Dance Festival at Connecticut College. International Encyclopedia of Dance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998) Vol. 3: 383-5.
30. I would like to thank Lloyd and Janet Morgan and the Barbara Morgan Archives for their assistance with this exhibition and for access and permission to reproduce the materials in the catalogue.