Barbara Crane at Flatfile

In the late 1960s, Barbara Crane, the Chicago photographer, was handling a sheet of 35mm contact prints. Intrigued by the patterns that the images made on the page, she began to tape negatives to heavy glass and print the configurations using an enlarger, creating photo-collages in grid form. Ever since, she has explored the formal, expressive and technical possibilities of the photo-grid, creating an inexhaustibly inventive body of work. During May and June, Flatfile exhibited 42 of Crane's black-and-white and color grids made as gelatin silver, Polaroid SX-70 and digital inkjet prints. Dating from 1969 to 2005, these works range in size from 6V2 by 7 1/2 inches to 5 feet square.

When, in the 1970s, Baxter Travenol Labs, the medical manufacturer, commissioned Crane to make photo-collages for its offices, she created grids looking like art that has been matted and framed. In Picnix (1975), for example, using a lively variety of motifs, she placed a cloth-draped picnic basket at the center, surrounded it with a wide "mat" made from repeated images of Baxter plant machinery and "framed" the piece with photos of a stone path. Crane sought out images for some of the Baxter grids and assembled others from materials she had at hand.

The artist later experimented with an SX-70 Polaroid camera, affixing tape to its internal rollers and running the film through. By varying the position of the tape, she achieved unique color prints of broken vertical lines against a black background. In 25 SX-70s in Black (1980), she mounted 25 of these prints in a grid, in which the softly colored lines appear to sway.

When Crane purchased a vacation cabin in Michigan, she began to take pictures of nature, and her work became personal and humorous. She shot small rocks on the beach from above at the time of day when the sun casts long shadows. Rock Rumba (1991) is a grid of these photographs, which are printed as negatives, so the rocks come out black and the shadows are a brilliant white; the images suggest whirling dancers in long skirts.

Crane made Inner Circle (2004) by pressing a fish-eye lens close to a maple leaf from below, so the leaf looks curved, almost handlike, while the forest canopy and sky suggest a globe. The artist mounted 12 such leaf images on a black background, creating a grid that is filled with spring colors and life.

COPYRIGHT 2005 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2005 Gale Group