Light Is a Plastic Medium

Carlotta Corpron (b. Blue Earth, Minnesota, 1901–1988) spent her childhood in India, where she attended an English boarding school in the Himalayas. She returned to the United States in 1920 and earned a BS in education from Michigan State Normal College in 1925 and an MA from Teachers College of Columbia University in 1926. From 1928–1935, Corpron taught at the University of Cincinnati, purcashing her first camera in 1933 for use in textile design classes. Her interest in photography flourished after moving to Denton, Texas, in 1935 to teach art history and design at Texas State College for Women. There she spent long hours in the darkroom developing an experimental photography practice centered around photographing light, and forged a connection with the Chicago New Bauhaus when she assisted its founder, László Moholy-Nagy, with a light workshop he taught in Denton in 1942. Although she stopped working in the darkroom in 1955 due to a debilitating medical condition, Corpron’s photography was included in the groundbreaking 1975–1976 exhibition Women of Photography: An Historical Survey, which debuted at the San Francisco Museum of Art and traveled to the Museum of New Mexico, Santa Fe; University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee; and Wellesley College Museum. Her work has been featured in solo exhibitions at the Dallas Museum of Art (1948), Art Institute of Chicago (1953), and Amon Carter Museum of American Art (1980).