Private Views

Private Views gathers the Polaroid photographs Barbara Crane made in Chicago's summer festival crowds between 1980 and 1984, pictures shot close enough that the camera's speed is doing as much work as her eye.

Around 105 color plates fill the book, most of them cropped tight on people eating, drinking, and pressed together in the crowd. The instant print let Crane keep working at a pace and a proximity a slower camera would not have allowed, and she photographed the same festivals across four summers. Aperture published the volume in 2009 with a text by Barbara Hitchcock, on the occasion of a retrospective of the series at Stephen Daiter Gallery in Chicago that November and December. It is bound in cloth over boards, a single Polaroid reproduction set into a recessed panel on the front, and was issued without a jacket.

Crane (1928-2019) studied under Aaron Siskind at the Institute of Design in Chicago and taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago from 1967 to 1995. Chicago and its crowds run through most of her work, usually organized by repetition: the grids, sequences, and repeated frames of series such as People of the North Portal, Neon, and Monster. Private Views is the loosest of these, built on the single quick frame rather than the set.