The photography of Tracy Baran is brave and honest, introspective, and simply beautiful no matter what her subject. A keen eye for color, light and composition her work sticks with you like a good film.
Sadly Tracey died in 2008 at the young age of 33. The Tracey Baran Award was created soon after and is now accepting applications.
“The Tracey Baran Award was established to honor the memory and achievement of Tracey Baran, a young photographer who died after a short illness in 2008. This annual award, with a fellowship grant of $5000, will be given to one emerging female photographer who is a citizen of the United States.”
Me, Myself and You, 2007
Who's Leda? 1999
From an essay written for Tracey Baran’s 2002 solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, curator Karen Irvine wrote:
Tracey Baran creates visual journals, using color photography to record and refine her experiences into images that reference fundamental themes such as love, death, and regeneration. Rarely preconceiving her pictures, Baran works in an intuitive manner, casting her photographer’s eye on the world until something sticks. Thus a photograph can occur at any moment, in any place, in a practice that starts with instinct and results in the communication of very universal experiences.
Through a process of careful extraction and editing, Baran creates lyrical images that invite open interpretation. Her photographs function with a cumulative intensity. Like a written diary, in which each entry is better understood upon reading further, the true spirit of Baran’s photographs is discovered when they are considered as a part of the whole. Each photograph informs the others and in that interplay of images, their meaning fluctuates and expands.
