Visual artist, Nancy Baron, was born in Chicago and is now based in Los Angeles and Palm Springs, California. In her fine art documentary photography, she uses portraits, landscapes, and architectural photographs to record the world nearby with a hopeful bias. Her background in filmmaking, including the documentary form, has inspired her to honor the still image while giving it a cinematic tone.
Nancy’s prints have been shown in group and one-person exhibitions internationally and are held in public and private collections. Her photography has been published in notable magazines and newspapers worldwide, including The New York Times, Madame Figaro, W Magazine, Architectural Digest, The Telegraph Magazine, Conde Nast Traveler, Fast Times, Mother Jones, and on the Apple, CNN, and BBC websites.
Baron’s two monographs, The Good Life > Palm Springs and Palm Springs > The Good Life Goes On are published by Kehrer Verlag and are held in the collection of the Library of Congress and in various museum libraries, including MOMA, LACMA, the Getty, The Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, and The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Austin.
Nancy’s third monograph, Palm Springs Modern Dogs at Home, was published by Schiffer Books in September 2020.
“The stars will never be won by little minds; we must be as big as space itself.”
Robert A. Heinlein, Double Star, 1956
Robert Heinlein’s poetic quote could easily describe Wernher von Braun and Jack Parsons. The engineers - one German, one American - were obsessed with rocketry and blessed with the big thinking that ushered humans beyond Earth’s boundaries in the post-World War II era. But, their biographies are complicated. Von Braun was a Nazi, and Parson’s was an occultist. While the former’s wartime affiliations were scrubbed from NASA’s illustrious institutional history in order to highlight his contributions to the American space race effort, the latter was written out the same history altogether.
Since 2018, Chicago-based photographer Barbara Diener has nurtured a similar passion for the two enigmatic rocket scientists. The Rocket’s Red Glare speculatively reunites the former telephone correspondents, mapping their lives and the selective retelling of significant historical events in which one was elevated, and the other minimized. Diener’s intensive, research-based work is also a personal reckoning with her German heritage and the ever-rippling psychological effect of the war’s humanitarian catastrophe.
Our interview, which started with a Zoom studio visit and continued via email, takes up the origin of this work and how the complicated narratives of two long-dead scientists shapes her photographic practice.
Born in 1982 in Germany, Barbara Diener received her Bachelor of Fine Art in Photography from the California College of the Arts and Masters in Fine Art in Photography from Columbia College Chicago.
Her work has been exhibited at both national and international venues including the Griffin Museum of Photography, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, New Mexico Museum of Art, and Pingyao Photo Festival, China. Currently, she is the Collection Manager in the Department of Photography and Media at the Art Institute of Chicago and teaches photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
