Just over a year ago, photographer Tracey Baran (1975-2008) was emerging from the category of emerging young photographer to the next rung. Born in rural Western New York State, she came to New York to study at the School of Visual Arts in 1993. Her first one-person exhibition was in 1998 at Liebman Magnan Gallery in New York, followed by six more solo shows including one at the Museum of Cotemporary Photography in Chicago in 2002. In addition, she participated in over 30 group shows throughout the world. Baran was beginning to see her name written large in the right places when she was hospitalized briefly in 2008. She never recovered.

Left to right: Ivy, 2001. I Miss You Already, 2004; Joseph, 2001. Courtesy the Museum of Contemporary Photography.

Her work and that of other top young photographers is now available at the Tracey Baran Memorial Auction to benefit an annual grant for an emerging female photographer from the U.S. The grant, organized by her family and friends, and administered by the School of Visual Arts, is a celebration of her life and photographic work, and is open to applications. To view the available lots in the auction, which is on until September 30^th go to igavel.com. The lots are also available for viewing by appointment at 229 East 120^th Street, New York, New York, NY. For information please call or email 212-289-5588 or info@igavel.com.

In the introduction to his interview with Tracey Baran for Uovo magazine (2006), the critic and poet Barry Schwabsky wrote, "From the moment I first saw Tracey Baran's work, back in 1998, it's haunted me. Tracey was just 23 then, but already there was something preternaturally self-aware in her photographic gaze. Turning her camera on her family, her friends and herself, she was making pictures with a rare combination of empathy and frankness - producing images somehow at once oblique and confrontational, emotionally raw and formally self-possessed. I wondered how someone so young could look at things so knowingly. Eight years later, having watched her work steadily deepening, I'm even more nonplussed. Why should images - especially ones of what is after all a most ordinary American life - be so physically compelling?"

In The New Yorker (March 6, 2006), the critic Vince Aletti wrote, "No matter how frank, the autobiographical photo always involves a delicate balance of truth and fiction, artlessness and art. Tracey Baran's latest pictures...continue a narrative that she began in 1998, with a series of family images that blurred the line between staged and spontaneous moments. Her work, always great to look at, has become sexier and more assured since then, but it still thrives on this confusion. Baran telegraphs the fraught nuances of relationships - with  her father, a female friend, or a lover who's no more than a hand cupping her face on a couch - so effieciently that her pictures feel like epigrams, terse and telling."

Tracey Baran's work is also on view at Lesley Tonkanow Artworks + Projects through October 17^th. 535 West 22nd Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, sixth floor. In addition, a portfolio of her images is featured in the current issue of Dear Dave magazine.