Barbara Kasten (American, 1936- )

Barbara Kasten earned an M.F.A. at California College of Arts and Crafts, 1970. Known for her luminous use of color, the Chicago-born Kasten fabricates or commissions the construction of all of the objects in her photographs: painted black rods, half-moon mirrors, elongated pyramids, cones, and spheres, and cut-paper forms, to serve as light modulators. Influenced by the geometric work of Held, Lewitt, Mangold and Rockburne, and by Moholy-Nagy and Man Ray, she photographs her constructions from unusual angles, using strobes, gels and sequential exposures to "paint with light" before the print is made. She currently makes mural-sized "digital paintings" and has received fellowships from Fulbright-Hays, Guggenheim, and the Polaroid Collection.
- Virginia Lee Lierz

Selected Bibliography
Grundberg, Andy, and Gauss, Kathleen McCarthy. Photography and Art. New York: Abbeville Press, 1987, pp. 180-181. Photograph, p. 198.

Rosenblume, Naomi. History of Women Photographers; pp. 251-252; 340.

Constructs: Photographs by Barbara Kasten. Beacon. New York Graphic Society. Little, Brown and Company (1983). Essay by Estelle Jussin.

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