Barbara Strigel is a photographer, collage artist and bookmaker living and working in Vancouver, British Columbia. She was born in Philadelphia and studied photography and printmaking at the Museum School in Boston. For over 20 years, she was a photography teacher in a public high school in Seattle where she also advised the literary magazine and yearbook. Since her retirement in 2013, she has been actively establishing her fine art practice.
Strigel's work digitally combines photography with abstract collage to explore themes relating to separation and connection. In describing the search for visual grace inherent in street photography and collage, she references the idea of gestalt, the whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. She values the improvisation of collage and the way it allows her to pull out what is hidden in the familiar. Her influences include Paul Klee, George Braque, Richard Diebenkorn and Romare Bearden as well as Henri Cartier Bresson, Harry Callahan and Saul Leiter.
Her collages, photographs and handmade books have been shown in both Canada and the United States. She has been featured multiple times in the Blue Sky Gallery's viewing drawers and the Art Rental Sales showroom at the Vancouver Art Gallery. Her work has been published in Diffusion Annual, PDN, Don't Take Pictures, Photo Ed and Book Arts Du Livre. In 2019, she was recognized in the Top 50 in Photo-Lucida's Critical Mass. In 2020, she was awarded an honorable mention in Klompching Gallery's Fresh competition.
