Barbara Morgan
Photographs of Modern Dance
Between the mid-1930s and mid-1940s, Barbara Morgan forged one of the most defining collaborations in the history of American photography and modern dance. Her partnership with the pioneering dancer and choreographer Martha Graham yielded images that are now iconic, not just for their formal clarity, but for their psychological resonance. Morgan didn’t aim to document choreography; she sought to translate its emotional undercurrents into still form.
This Viewing Room presents six vintage and early gelatin silver prints, each an expression of Morgan’s deep engagement with movement, light, and the emotional architecture of performance. Four works spotlight Martha Graham and her company, including seminal pieces such as Frontier, Letter to the World, and American Document. The remaining two feature the electrifying soloist Valerie Bettis, whose raw, expressive physicality in Desperate Heart offered Morgan a compelling counterpart to Graham’s intensity. One of the Graham works, Death and Entrances, is a rare photomontage, a technique Morgan employed only occasionally in her dance photography.
These prints vary in scale but share a consistent richness of tone and clarity of form. Each was crafted with Morgan’s exacting darkroom technique, and many were intended as exhibition prints. Collectively, they reveal the full sculptural and emotional range of her vision.
What connects them all is Morgan’s boundary-pushing use of photography. From clean, sculptural compositions to bold double exposures and photomontage, she expanded the medium’s ability to capture not just motion but meaning. Prints of this caliber are rare, prized not only for their historical significance but for the masterful way they collapse time, emotion, and gesture into a single, unforgettable frame.
I’m very pleased to offer these six rare vintage prints to collectors and institutions. Each is available for private acquisition. You can view them all in the Viewing Room below.
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Vintage prints by Barbara Morgan are increasingly scarce. Examples of this quality are held by major institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, the Library of Congress, the National Portrait Gallery, and the International Center of Photography. The works presented here offer an exceptional opportunity for both private and institutional collections.
“It is rare that even an inspired photographer possesses the demonic eye which can capture the instant of dance and transform it into timeless gesture. In Barbara Morgan I found that person.”
Martha Graham