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 (1970-1), Melissa Shook’s Daily Self Portraits (1972-3), and Carol Taback’s photo booth pictures (1978-1980). While each photographer focused on different constituencies--with Crane capturing strangers on the street in Chicago, Taback memorializing friends in her Philadelphia studio, and Shook becoming the subject of her own pictures—they nevertheless operated under similar self-imposed constraints. They created strict guidelines that delimited where they would photograph, confining their working environments to a single doorway, a cramped photo booth, or a small New York apartment. Despite, or perhaps because of, these rigid parameters, each photographer was able to forge an innovative and highly original approach to portrait-making, producing pictures that deftly call attention to the complexity of lived experience.