Jan Groover
Photographer Painter
Jan Groover was an American photographer from New Jersey who died in 2012.
She studied painting at the Pratt Institute in New York, graduating in 1965. After completing a master's degree at Ohio University, she taught at the University of Hartford, Connecticut, and at the State University of New York. Gregory Crewdson was among her students.
Jan Groover took up photography as a challenge. Noting that ‘photography was not taken seriously’ in the United States in the 1960s, she moved away from abstract painting, which she had studied. In 1967, Jan Groover bought her first camera, which she described as her ‘first adult act.’ However, her taste for abstraction and pictoriality was evident from her earliest series of polyptychs, in which the subject was multiplied, fragmented or hidden behind opaque forms, to the point of being negated.
From the late 1970s onwards, Jan Groover turned to still life, a classic genre of the pictorial arts, which she explored until the end of her life through an exceptional diversity of subjects, formats and processes. While documentary photography was in the spotlight in magazines such as LIFE, Jan Groover drew on her knowledge of painting in her photographic work, helping to elevate abstract photography to a higher level, producing images for the pleasure of form, far removed from any meaning or political statement.
In addition to still lifes, Jan Groover's work also includes series on the themes of motorways, portraits and body parts. A key player in the transformation of the photographic medium towards greater versatility, a quality previously attributed to painting or drawing, Jan Groover experiments with different creative techniques. For example, she uses platinum and palladium printing for her series of urban photographs and portraits of her loved ones, such as John Coplans and Janet Borden, with whom she is in constant intellectual dialogue.
Featured in numerous public collections around the world, her work was the subject of a major retrospective at MoMA in New York in 1987 and more recently at the Musée de l'Élysée in Lausanne, Switzerland (2019).
Jan Groover is considered one of the greatest American photographers, particularly known for her still life compositions. Her work has had an impact on the recognition of colour photography.
(Source : henricartierbresson.org)