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Martha Graham - Frontier

Creator

American Photographer · 1900–1992

Artist

>We didn't have very much money, so [my husband] set up our darkroom in the bathroom. Every time I went to the bathroom, I learned about photography, because there would be [his] negatives hanging and dangling, and prints washing in trays...I never studied photography, I absorbed it. Barbara Morgan grew up in California and studied painting at the University of California at Los Angeles. Upon grad

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Date: 1935
Medium: Gelatin silver print
Culture: American
Department: Photographs
Institution: Getty Museum

"Absorbing the spirit of the dance" was how Barbara Morgan described her way of working. She collaborated with American dancer and choreographer Martha Graham in recreating movements that Graham selected as "significant gestures" from each piece. "Frontier" allowed Graham to demonstrate her extraordinary flexibility, and Morgan highlighted this quality in her photographs of the piece. Here she represented the dancer's famous "fan kick," which involved lifting her leg to the side and moving it in a circle while keeping her back straight.

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