Carlotta Corpron: Fluid Light

4 December 2021 - 8 January 2022
Overview
Carlotta Corpron, Fluid Light
For most people, photography, or the camera, is just something that can record an event, a situation, or a scene. At first, I took pictures all over of the things that everybody photographs. I liked them, but I still had the feeling that they were not quite my own. Somebody with the same camera and the same lighting could have taken the same picture. But I want my photographs to be mine, I want to feel that I am the one who saw them. I think that's why I went into the kind of photography I did, because I had this intense desire to create with light.
-        Carlotta Corpron, 1980

Carlotta Corpron (December 9, 1901 – April 17, 1988) was an American photographer known for her abstract compositions featuring light and reflections, made mostly during the 1940s and 1950s. She is considered a pioneer of American abstract photography and a key figure in Bauhaus-influenced photography in Texas.

Press release

Marshall Gallery is pleased to present an intimate project room installation of 1940s light abstractions by Texas Bauhaus artist Carlotta Corpron curated from the McIntosh Collection, Los Angeles. Carlotta Corpron (1901-1988) was an American photographer known for her abstract compositions exploring light and its capabilities as a medium for creative design. 

 

A rare collection of ten gelatin silver prints, the works on view range from mounted vintage contact prints of the 1940s to larger experimental compositions and solarized nature studies made in the 1970s. Corpron is considered a pioneer of American abstract photography and a key figure in Bauhaus-influenced photography in north Texas during nearly four decades teaching at the Texas Woman's University. Too long left in obscurity among the history of photography, mostly as a result of a career commitment to her students, Corpron's creative efforts nevertheless won the acclaim of leading figures in the photographic avant-garde such as László Moholy-Nagy, Alfred Stieglitz, and especially that of György Kepes. 

 

Corpron's work is featured in the current museum exhibition Women in Abstraction traveling from the Centre Pompidou, Paris to the Guggenheim, Bilbao, and was included in the 1979 exhibition Recollections: Ten Women of Photography at the ICP Museum, New York, and the 1980 one-woman exhibition, Designer with Light, at the Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth where her archive resides.

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