page_title: Barbara Morgan (photographer)
section_title: Photomontage and light drawing
hierarchical_section_title: Barbara Morgan (photographer) / Biography / Photomontage and light drawing
caption_attribution_description: English: Pure Energy and Neurotic Man
context_page_description: Barbara Morgan was an American photographer best known for her depictions of modern dancers. She was a co-founder of the photography magazine Aperture.
  Morgan is known in the visual art and dance worlds for her penetrating studies of American modern dancers Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham, Erick Hawkins, José Limón, Doris Humphrey, Charles Weidman and others. Morgan's drawings, prints, watercolors and paintings were exhibited widely in California in the 1920s, and in New York and Philadelphia in the 1930s.
context_section_description: In her continuing quest to do more with photography, Morgan “began to feel the pervasive, vibratory character of light energy as a partner of the physical and spiritual energy of the dance, and as the prime mover of the photographic process. “Suddenly, I decided to pay my respects to light, and create a rhythmical light design for the book tailpiece.” She created gestural light drawings with an open shuttered camera in her darkened studio.
  Although photomontage was enthusiastically practiced in Europe and Latin America in the 1930s and 40s, it was still alien to American photography and widely disparaged. Morgan's knowledge of the European avant-garde, and her friendship with Lucia and László Moholy-Nagy, furthered her interest in montage. She was particularly struck by how the genre could capture the multiplicity of modern American life. She worked with themes of social concern and natural and constructed environments.
caption: Pure Energy and Neurotic Man (1940)
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