Barbara Crane archive

The Barbara Crane Archive consists of personal and business papers, audiovisual materials, and photographic materials given to the Center for Creative Photography by noted teacher-photographer Barbara Crane. The material spans the years from 1946 to 2013 with the majority falling in the years 1963 to 1995. Basic series have been established and folder labels have been recorded together with available dates. It is hoped that this temporary arrangement of Barbara Crane’s papers and photographic materials will enable students, scholars, and other interested parties to gain access to the collection and to learn about the photographer’s methods in her art and in her teaching.

The biographical materials consist primarily of the day calendars of Barbara Crane from 1978 to 1993. Calendars for the years 1987 and 1991 are missing. Barbara Crane’s correspondence was originally separated in her files into three groups: personal correspondence, business correspondence, and correspondence with students. These three correspondence groups have been merged, and the correspondence has been arranged into a chronological sequence, with an alphabetical sub-arrangement. Barbara Crane’s correspondence spans from 1963 to 1999, with the bulk of the material falling between the years 1970 to 1998. In addition to the Correspondence series, teaching and business-related correspondence may also be found within the Teaching subseries of the Activity Files series, as well as within the Exhibitions series.

Crane’s major projects have been brought together as Activity Files. These include her major photographic projects such as the Chicago Landmarks Project, the Centex Industrial Park Portraits, and the O’Hare International Terminal Project as well as her teaching projects at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago as well as numerous workshops. Crane’s lecture notes are organized by year from 1977 to 1997 with some additional undated notes. No folders exist for the years 1979, 1980, 1982, 1983, 1986, 1989, 1990, 1992, or 1994 to 1996.

The exhibition history of Barbara Crane is documented in four boxes of material that spans the years from 1970 to 1998. These materials include correspondence, photograph lists, insurance valuations, and shipping records. The folders vary in being labeled for the year of the exhibition and the name of the exhibition venue.

Five boxes document Crane’s publications and run from her Bachelor’s degree thesis (“A Study of Religious Architecture”) through the numerous periodicals that have featured her work, to the book Barbara Crane: 1948-1980 which was published in 1981 by the Center for Creative Photography. Three additional boxes hold numerous audio and video tapes of Crane’s talks, lectures, and interviews.

The photographic materials consist of negatives, prints, negatives and contact sheets, copy negatives of major shows, as well as some of the “found objects” used in the prints Crane labels, “Objets Trouvees.” Crane’s item numbers have been retained in the photographic materials series as a link to her descriptions of their contents and numerical counts. The series holds some prints including four accordion books of color Polaroid prints document her “Desert Sequences,” which were precursors to her work, “Visons of Enarc.” A box of materials containing Paul Vanderbilt’s slide lecture regarding the Wisconsin State Historical Society Collection is also included in Crane’s photographic materials.

The Center’s fine print collection has 69 prints of Crane’s work, and the control file has an eight-page abbreviated curriculum vitae for the artist.