Barbara Crane is a pioneering internationally renowned art photographer and influential educator who has explored photography as a vehicle for creative expression for over sixty years. A forerunner in experimental and abstract photography, Crane has explored numerous photographic processes throughout her extensive career. The result has been an ongoing evolving body of conceptually consistent work, varied in approach and experimental in style. An early investigator of repetition and deconstruction of visual information, she has experimented extensively with sequences, grids, scrolls, and large modular murals. Crane has worked in many formats and materials, ranging from intimate in size to large scale, utilizing such diverse photographic approaches as platinum-palladium, Polaroid processes, image transfers, gelatin silver and digital.

Born in Chicago in 1928, Crane studied at Mills College in California, completing her Bachelor of Arts Degree in Art History at New York University, and in 1966 received her Master of Science Degree from the Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology. She began teaching photography in 1964 and in 1967 joined the faculty at the prestigious School of the Art Institute of Chicago, retiring from teaching in 1995 as Professor Emerita of Photography.

Crane’s photographic work has been featured in over ninety solo exhibitions since 1965 and seven retrospective exhibitions of her work have been mounted to date. Barbara Crane: Challenging Vision, an extensive career retrospective, was accompanied by a major monograph of the same title. The exhibition opened at the Chicago Cultural Center in October 2009 and has traveled to the Amon Carter Museum in Texas and the Griffin Museum of Photography in Massachusetts. Most recently, her work is featured in concurrent exhibitions––The Polaroid Years at Catherine Edelman Gallery and Barbara Crane At Ninety: A Look At Selected Series at Stephen Daiter Gallery in Chicago.