In the Right Place

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.