Born in Buffalo, Kansas, and raised in Southern California, Barbara Morgan attended UCLA and taught design, woodcut, and painting there. After attending a performance by the fledgling Martha Graham Company, Morgan began to work on a book of photographs capturing Graham’s dancers. After this, she continued to photograph other modern dancers, capturing individual, fleeting moments and turning them timeless. Morgan is also remembered as a co-founder of Aperture magazine in 1951, one of the few publications at the time to nurture a dialogue among photographers and treat photography as a fine art. Her works are held in the collections of the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., The Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, among others.
