Exhibition - In the Right Place: Photographs by Barbara Crane, Melissa Shook, and Carol Taback

This exhibition brings together three photographic series made in the 1970s: Barbara Crane’s People of the North Portal (1970–71), Melissa Shook’s Daily Self Portraits (1972–73), and Carol Taback’s Photo-Booth Strips (1978–80). The three photographers worked in different cities-Crane in Chicago, Shook in New York, and Taback in Philadelphia-and may not have ever crossed paths. They also used different cameras and equipment and made radically different choices about who to photograph.

Nevertheless, there is a surprising alignment in their approaches to their work. Each photographer elected to operate under similar self-imposed constraints, creating strict guidelines that dictated where they would photograph. Crane confined her working environment to a single doorway, Shook to her small New York tenement apartment, and Taback to a cramped photo booth. Despite, or perhaps because of, these rigid parameters, each photographer was able to forge an innovative approach to portrait-making, producing pictures that deftly call attention to the complexity of lived experience.

Location: Honickman Gallery 156