Light Is a Plastic Medium:

Light Is a Plastic Medium: The Photography of Carlotta Corpron is a survey of work by the American abstract photographer and educator whose investigations into the poetics of light and form and innovative use of technology supported the establishment of photography as fine art. Highlighting her biography and artistic achievements, the exhibition will position Corpron (1901–1988) in the artistic vanguard through six bodies of photography that she made in Texas from the late 1930s to the early 1950s. The exhibition showcases 48 recent gifts by Herbert Lust to the Hirshhorn, as well as additional loans from his collection. 

​​Corpron spent most of her life removed from the urban centers of the art world, moving to Denton, Texas, in 1935 to teach art history and design at Texas State College for Women (now Texas Women’s University). Yet she aligned herself with international visionaries and influential photographers, including Alfred Stieglitz, László Moholy-Nagy, and György Kepes, who focused on elevating photography as a fine-art form. Light Is a Plastic Medium traces the artist’s development from early photographs of nature to sophisticated gestural light drawings and formal studies of light and form, culminating in complex expansions and distortions of space.

In the United States, a new mode of creative exploration for abstract photography flourished at the New Bauhaus in Chicago, founded in 1937 under the direction of Moholy-Nagy. The New Bauhaus curriculum underlined photography’s relationship to light, an influential principle that remained central to Corpron’s practice from her introduction to the medium in 1933 through 1955, when she stopped working in the darkroom for health reasons. From her earliest work, Corpron was fascinated by how light changes perception of form and how this function could be conveyed through a camera lens. Her inquiry into light’s impact on form was central to her six bodies of work on view at the Hirshhorn: Nature Studies, Light Drawings, Light Patterns, Light Follows Form, Space Compositions, and Fluid Light Designs.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website