As a 20-year-old art history student at NYU in the late 1940s, Barbara Crane (1929–2019) would use her Rolleiflex to surreptitiously photograph her fellow passengers on the Staten Island Ferry. She had a talent for capturing the beauty of the mundane. Over her career, Crane captured people from all walks of life—from locals at county fairs in Phoenix to museum patrons in Chicago. A streak of the avant-garde led the Chicago-born artist to experiment with juxtaposition and gridding in her work. Upon seeing a selection of Crane’s photographs in 1971, Ansel Adams told an assistant, “See, I told you photographers could still do something different.” The first major Barbara Crane monograph in Europe features 200 photographs, some never before exhibited, pulled primarily from the first 20 years of her pioneering career. —Paulina Prosnitz