BARBARA CRANE: CHALLENGING VISION

Chicago, IL: Chicago Cultural Center, 2009. First Edition. First Printing.. Hardcover. As New/As New Dust Jacket.. Chicago, IL: Chicago Cultural Center, 2009. Hardcover. As New/As New. First Edition/First Printing. 252 pages. Retrospective Monograph. The single best book on the photographic art and achievement of Barbara Crane. The First Hardcover Edition. Precedes and should not be confused with all other subsequent editions. Published in a small and limited first print run as a hardcover original only by The City of Chicago. The First Edition is now scarce. An austerely elegant production by Joan Sommers: Oversize-volume format. The book weighs 7 pounds. Gray cloth boards with titles embossed on cover and spine, as issued. Photographs by Barbara Crane. Text by various contributors. Printed in quadrotone and color on pristine-white, thick coated stock paper to the highest standards. In pictorial DJ with titles on the cover and spine, as issued. Published on the occasion of the photographer's 80th birthday and in conjunction with the travelling exhibition organized by Chicago in her honor, which commenced at the Amon Carter Museum Fort Worth from February through May, 2009, came back to Chicago on October 3, 2009, ran through January 10, 2010, and travelled on to other venues in 2010. Presents Barbara Crane's "Challenging Vision". Her finest and most representative images, taken over a fruitful sixty-year career. "Crane's work is, foremost, about Nature, both human nature and that of the biological world. One shares her world of intimate visual discoveries either captured by the camera or created from pure imagination. Crane has forged her own path of photographic invention, often as the lone woman in a male-dominated field. For the past sixty years, she has reinvented her vision and pursued new subjects and compositional challenges, even in the Digital Age. She fully embraces the emotional and formal aspects of the medium to challenge vision" (Publisher's blurb). Barbara Crane has stated that her lifelong goal as a photographer has been to "attempt to eradicate previous habits of seeing and thinking, to keep searching for what is visually new while always hoping that a fusion of form and content will take place", and that "once I developed my first roll of film in 1948, nothing else mattered" (Barbara Crane). Indefatigable until the end, Barbara Crane died on August 7, 2019 at the age of 91. An absolute "must-have" title for Barbara Crane collectors. This title is a contemporary art photography classic. This is one of few copies of the First Hardcover Edition/First Printing still available, is still in the publisher's original shrinkwrap, and is in especially fine condition: Clean, crisp, and bright. Please note: Copies available online have serious flaws yet command unheard-of prices (in the hundreds to more than a thousand dollars) because the book is scarce in any condition. This is surely an accessible and lovely alternative. A rare copy thus. 178 quadrotone, 115 color plates. One of the finest American photographers of our time. A fine copy. (SEE ALSO OTHER BARBARA CRANE TITLES IN OUR CATALOG). ISBN 093890342X.