Barbara Crane: Artifacts and Entities
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In the 60s and 70s, Barbara Crane created wonderfully complex photographs using the “whole roll,” printing sequences of similar images on long scrolls of paper or in grids. Although the individual panels are of interest, the dark spaces between them are what came to life, the passages of time not photographed. Time is the medium that animates still photography, yet like a ghost it merely haunts the film; one must hunt between the shutter’s openings to watch it passing. In effect Crane’s “Whole Roll” series translates part of the experience of cinema onto paper–only a part, since she takes no real interest in narrative. It’s as if by stilling sequences of pictures she might discover just when they begin to move. The spaces in between frames that are but flickers in the cinema become black spaces on the page and spread out Crane’s catalog of commonplace objects–a bus, pigeons, a hillside with clouds. Several vintage examples of this series on display at Lallak + Tom Gallery–a year-old space that shows emerging photographers alongside established artists like Crane (who recently retired from teaching at the School of the Art Institute)–make clear these are not just pictures, they’re experiences in time.
During the same years Ray Metz-ker, another photographer trained at Chicago’s modernist Institute of Design, also made striking images by contact-printing strips of negatives. His great insight was that the proof sheet can be a picture in itself, and he set about making pictures it takes a whole roll to see. But Crane’s and Metzker’s experiments were never truly alike. Metzker’s goal was collage, the enlargement of his overall frame to include multiple frames: his best “Composites” are like vast windows with myriad openings. Crane’s interest has always been in repetition; a “Whole Roll” must be scrutinized frame by frame. Compared to Metz-ker’s “Composites,” Crane’s serial photographs look like cuttings of movie film. Each frame is nearly identical to the others in the sequence but comes from a slightly different vantage in time. The overall effect may be less striking, but the nuances are rich indeed.
