In the 1960s and 1970s artists explored the conceptual possibilities of photography, including the playfully “bad” images of John Baldessari and Ed Ruscha, the Photography and Language group’s exploration of semiotics, and the postmodernism of Pictures Generation artists like Louise Lawler, Robert Longo, and Cindy Sherman. In Chicago at the Institute of Design, photographers like Crane, Joseph Jachna, and Kenneth Josephson explored the conventions of the medium itself.

For her Whole Roll series, Crane exposed entire rolls of 35mm film, repeatedly photographing the same subject (in this case tar splatters on city streets). She then cut up and rearranged the individual negatives and printed the entire group as a single photograph, deploying a process usually used to edit images to create a final composition. The individual images resemble gestural marks, but together they become a catalog of specimens or the invention of a new, calligraphic alphabet.

—Text taken from the Carter Handbook (2023)