In 1935, Corpron was invited to teach design at Texas State College for Women (now Texas Woman's University) in Denton, Texas, where she worked for over three decades and enjoyed her most productive years as an artist. Shortly after her arrival, she was asked to teach a photography course. Feeling that she needed to better understand the process before she could teach it, she attended a summer course on photographic techniques at the Art Center in Los Angeles, but she found herself frustrated and bored with the class assignments to photograph around Los Angeles. She wanted to make “original” images that sprang from her individual vision.

Corpron became more intrigued by light in 1942 when the famed Bauhaus professor, painter, and photographer László Moholy-Nagy came to Denton to teach for a term. Corpron worked as his assistant for a light workshop in which they taught the students how to make photograms: cameraless, unique images formed by objects placed on photo-sensitive paper and then exposed to light. Yet she felt that Moholy-Nagy did not understand what she was trying to do. Much more successful was her partnership two years later with Moholy-Nagy's associate, György Kepes, who came to Denton for a year to complete work for his influential book Language of Vision (1944) and to teach at what is now the University of North Texas. Corpron, who had been planning on taking a sabbatical to go study with him at the Institute of Design in Chicago, sought him out and asked to work with him. Kepes immediately recognized Corpron’s skill, calling her work “light poetry,” and encouraged her to expand her range, introducing Corpron to the light box, a device used for making controlled photographic studies of light. After Kepes left, Corpron continued her photographic experiments, working in the school darkrooms late at night and on the weekends. She later said, “As far as I’m concerned, the only influence on my work is Kepes.”^{jump to citation[x]}

In 1945, Corpron met photographer and gallerist Alfred Stieglitz in New York, who was interested in her work although he had not shown photography at his gallery An American Place since a 1938 Eliot Porter exhibition. He asked her to send him contact prints, which she did, but Stieglitz died soon after, and his widow, Georgia O’Keeffe, returned the prints and encouraged Corpron by telling her that Stieglitz would have wanted her “to go on—it is the only way.”^{jump to citation[x]} Through the mid-1950s, Corpron’s light studies were included in solo and group exhibitions held at galleries and museums across the country, including a monographic exhibition at the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts (now the Dallas Museum of Art) in 1948. Unfortunately, Corpron’s artistic career was stopped short in 1955 due to a debilitating medical condition that made it impossible for her to spend time in the darkroom. She instead focused her time and energy on her teaching career while still enjoying recreational photography. Her popularity waned after this and would not be revived until 1975, when she was included in the exhibition Women of Photography: An Historical Survey at the San Francisco Museum of Art (now SFMOMA). The renewed interest in her work culminated in a retrospective exhibition at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art titled Carlotta Corpron: Designer with Light (1980). After her close work with the Museum on this exhibition, Corpron made the decision to bequeath her archive to the Carter upon her death.