Barbara Traub is an American

photographer A photographer (the Greek language, Greek φῶς (''phos''), meaning "light", and γραφή (''graphê''), meaning "drawing, writing", together meaning "drawing with light") is a person who makes photographs. Duties and types of photographe ...

, who was born and raised in

Baltimore, Maryland Baltimore ( , locally: or ) is the List of municipalities in Maryland, most populous city in the U.S. state of Maryland, fourth most populous city in the Mid-Atlantic (United States), Mid-Atlantic, and List of United States cities by popula ...

. Several years after graduating from

Johns Hopkins University Johns Hopkins University (Johns Hopkins, Hopkins, or JHU) is a private university, private research university in Baltimore, Maryland. Founded in 1876, Johns Hopkins is the oldest research university in the United States and in the western hem ...

, she went on an exchange program to an art school in

Florence Florence ( ; it, Firenze ) is a city in Central Italy and the capital city of the Tuscany region. It is the most populated city in Tuscany, with 383,083 inhabitants in 2016, and over 1,520,000 in its metropolitan area.Bilancio demografico an ...

, Italy, for a semester with the intention of doing painting and drawing but at the last minute was handed a camera, thus establishing her future direction.

Career

Her early work was influenced primarily by the street photography/decisive moment aesthetics of

Robert Frank Robert Frank (November 9, 1924 – September 9, 2019) was a Swiss photographer and documentary filmmaker, who became an American binational. His most notable work, the 1958 book titled ''The Americans'', earned Frank comparisons to a modern-da ...

, Josef Koudelka, and

Henri Cartier-Bresson Henri Cartier-Bresson (; 22 August 1908 – 3 August 2004) was a French humanist photographer considered a master of candid photography, and an early user of 35mm film. He pioneered the genre of street photography, and viewed photography as cap ...

. In 1987 she won first place in the ''Baltimore Sun Magazine'' photo contest and held her first exhibition. She traveled worldwide, particularly in Southeast Asia, making informal portraits of people in their surroundings. Soon thereafter, she was introduced to the art of

Man Ray Man Ray (born Emmanuel Radnitzky; August 27, 1890 – November 18, 1976) was an American visual artist who spent most of his career in Paris. He was a significant contributor to the Dada and Surrealism, Surrealist movements, although his t ...

whose attention to surrealism, abstraction, and multimedia further influenced her style. In 1994 Traub moved to

San Francisco San Francisco (; Spanish language, Spanish for "Francis of Assisi, Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the List of Ca ...

. That summer she went to

Lake Tahoe Lake Tahoe (; was, Dáʔaw, meaning "the lake") is a Fresh water, freshwater lake in the Sierra Nevada (U.S.), Sierra Nevada of the United States. Lying at , it straddles the state line between California and Nevada, west of Carson City, Nevad ...

to photograph the figure as landscape and heard of the Black Rock Desert and shortly afterward its

Burning Man Burning Man is an event focused on community, art, self-expression, and self-reliance held annually in the western United States. The name of the event comes from its culminating ceremony: the symbolic burning of a large wooden effigy, referred ...

festival. In 1996 she worked on assignment for '' Wired'' magazine's cover story and again for ''Wired News'' in 2001 and 2006. She was chief photographer for HardWired's 1997 book ''Burning Man'' and curator of the Art of Burning Man exhibition at Photo SF 2004. Her book ''Desert to Dream: A Decade of Burning Man Photography'', was published in 2006 to favorable reviews. It has been described as "A lovely book, beautifully shot, surreal and random and appropriately odd" and recommended for academic collections of photographic studies. In 2009, ''

Time Time is the continued sequence of existence and events that occurs in an apparently irreversible succession from the past, through the present, into the future. It is a component quantity of various measurements used to sequence events, to ...

'' magazine declared the image on the book's cover to be an "Iconic Photo of Burning Man". A revised and expanded edition ''Desert to Dream: A Dozen Years of Burning Man Photography'' was released in 2011.

Books

*''Burning Man'' - HardWired, 1997. . *''Desert to Dream: A Decade of Burning Man Photography'' - Immedium, 2006. . *''Desert to Dream: A Dozen Years of Burning Man Photography'' - Immedium, 2011. .

Exhibitions

Traub's work has been shown in a number of solo and group exhibitions, including the following: * 2015, ''All About the Light'', Group exhibition, Robert Tat Gallery * 2011, "Essence Of Luminescence", solo exhibition, Canessa Gallery, San Francisco * 2011, "Every Reverie", solo exhibition, The McLoughlin Gallery in San Francisco * 2001, "Light2: Images from the Photography Collections", Group exhibition, Albin O. Kuhn Library Gallery, UMBC, Baltimore, MD * 1998, "Burning Mirror", solo exhibition, San Francisco Arts Commission * 1987, first solo show, Hubble Space Telescope Science Institute

References

External links

Archived version of official website
{{DEFAULTSORT:Traub, Barbara Living people 21st-century American women photographers 21st-century American photographers American photographers Artists from Baltimore Johns Hopkins University alumni Year of birth missing (living people)