Barbara Spohr

Barbara Spohr (1955–1987) was a Canadian photographer.

Career Spohr was born in Vancouver, British Columbia. From 1973 to 1974 she attended the Alberta College of Art and from 1974 to 1978, the Banff School of Fine Arts where she took sculptural weaving with Gyöngy Laky, painting and printmaking with Douglas Morton, Takao Tanabe, and Stephen Andrews and photography with Alison Rossiter. In 1979, she taught, and was artist-in-residence for one year at the Apeiron Photo Workshop in Millerton, NY. From this time on, photography was her art form.

In 1980, Spohr and nine other prominent Alberta artists were invited by Douglas Clark, Curator of Photography at the Edmonton Art Gallery to participate in A Photographic Project: Alberta 1980, and to document selected rural and urban communities. Spohr was assigned to Paddle Prairie, a Métis settlement in northern Alberta. In 1981, Spohr moved to Nelson, British Columbia where she continued with her own photography; from 1982 to 1983, she was as well assistant curator at the David Thompson University Centre's MacGregor Gallery. In 1983, she took a writing course at Selkirk College, Castlegar, BC, and did finish-line photography for horse racing associations. the National Gallery of Canada, the Banff Centre Collection, and the Art Gallery of Alberta. In 1987, after a life-long battle with Hodgkin's disease, Spohr died at the age of thirty-two Calgary, Alberta.