| In 1935, Barbara Morgan, a recent arrival in Depression-era New York, reinvented her career as an artist when she abandoned painting and adopted the medium of photography. In the four-and-a-half decades that followed, Morgan witnessed the remaining years of the Great Depression, World War II, the Korean Conflict, the Cold War, the Vietnam War, and Three Mile Island. This dissertation will trace the photographic oeuvre of Morgan as she responded to these events both directly and indirectly, while simultaneously tracking the important artistic and cultural trends of each decade.;The first chapter discusses Morgan's early photomontage work, in which she pushed the boundaries of American photography while exploring diverse metaphors for metropolitan splendor and urban isolation as well as the anxieties of the Great Depression and hope for a better future. Morgan's 1941 book Martha Graham: Sixteen Dances in Photographs anchors the second chapter. The influential dance photographs that comprise this publication highlight Morgan's modernist interpretations of Martha Graham's early dances and allow Morgan to examine beauty, strength, and a complex series of emotions through simple gestures and movement. The third chapter uses the light abstraction Morgan employed as a tailpiece for Sixteen Dances as the starting point to investigate her connections to broader artistic trends in the United States during and after the Second World War. In 1951, Morgan published Summer's Children, a photographic account of life in a summer camp that marked a major departure for the artist. Chapter four examines this book in the context of the Cold War and considers such diverse topics as summer camps, progressive education, fear-mongering, and the rise of the photo-spread. In the last two decades of her career, Morgan returned to the medium of photomontage. The fifth chapter examines this period, in which Morgan protested nuclear proliferation, environmental indifference, a perceived lack of scientific morality, and violent entertainment through her montages. |
