The exhibition, our fourth solo presentation of works by Tracey Baran, surveys the brief life and career of a young photographer who in barely more than one decade, produced an expansive visual diary composed of both spontaneously recorded moments and posed depictions. It provides a unique opportunity to experience her evolving aesthetic through more than one hundred contact sheets, small studies in color and black and white, and large color prints.
Within a continuing tradition of autobiographical images in American photography, from the distant formality of Alfred Stieglitz to the snapshot confrontations of Nan Goldin, Baran’s photographs are notable for their composed insights and emotional honesty.
The critic Barry Schwabsky, upon first seeing her work almost twenty years ago, recalled her photographs as “a rare combination of empathy and frankness … emotionally raw and formally self-possessed. I wondered how someone so young could look at things so knowingly.” Curator Karen Irvine wrote that “like Eggleston, Baran is fluent in the expressive capacity of color photography and she often counterbalances the formal beauty of her pictures with a certain unsettling ambiguity.” Vince Aletti wrote in The New Yorker that “Baran telegraphs the fraught nuances of relationships – with her father, a female friend, or a lover who’s no more than a hand cupping her face on a couch – so efficiently that her pictures feel like epigrams, terse and telling.”
Born in 1975 in Bath, a small rural town in the Finger Lakes region of western New York State, Baran arrived in New York City in 1993 to attend the School of Visual Arts. There she began the photographic project that would occupy the rest of her life – documenting herself, friends, lovers, family, and meaningful places in pictures that resonate with intense feeling, a strong painterly sensibility, and her consummate skill as a color printer.
Her first solo exhibition took place at the Liebman Magnan Gallery in New York in the spring of 1998, just months before the emergence of such other noted young women photographers as Justine Kurland, Katy Grannan, Malerie Marder, and Nikki S. Lee. She had six additional one-person shows, including a 2002 exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, and participated in more than thirty group shows at galleries and museums worldwide including, among others, the Guggenheim Museum in New York and Bilbao; the Folkwang Museum, Essen; MoMA PS1; the Milwaukee Art Museum; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and the Pusan Metropolitan Art Museum, Korea.
In the summer of 2008, as she was preparing for her third solo exhibition with this gallery, Tracey Baran became ill and died that fall at the age of thirty-three.
Works by the artist are in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Yale University Art Gallery, the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, the Milwaukee Art Museum, and the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College, among other institutions.
Gallery Hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 10:00 am to 6:00 pm.
Tracey Baran
In Process
September 15 – November 19, 2016
