Jan Groover

Jan Groover (April 24, 1943 – January 1, 2012) was an American photographer.

She received numerous one-person shows, including at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which holds some of her work in its permanent collection.

Groover was born and grew up in Plainfield, New Jersey.

She studied painting and drawing at Pratt Institute.

She received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1965 from Pratt Institute, and a Master of Arts in Education in 1970 from Ohio State University.

Her first large-format camera was bought immediately after winning a 1978 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Groover was noted for her use of emerging color technologies.

In 1979, she began to use platinum prints for portraits and to transform everyday items into formal still lifes.

In 1987, critic Andy Grundberg noted in The New York Times, "In 1978 an exhibition of her dramatic still-life photographs of objects in her kitchen sink caused a sensation. When one appeared on the cover of Artforum magazine, it was a signal that photography had arrived in the art world - complete with a marketplace to support it."

Groover also used early 20th century camera technology, such as the banquet camera, for elongated, horizontal presentations of otherwise pedestrian items.

Groover's work was the subject of a mid-career retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 1987, for which an accompanying catalogue was printed.

Her work has also been the subject of one-person exhibitions at the Baltimore Museum of Art; Cleveland Museum of Art; the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; and the International Museum of Photography, George Eastman House, Rochester, New York.

Groover and her husband, a painter and critic named Bruce Boice, left the United States and moved to Montpon-Ménestérol, France in 1991.

She had felt demoralized by what she felt was a turn toward deep political conservatism in the United States.

On this occasion, Groover purchased a larger camera and shifted her work from still-life photographs of everyday objects to photos of her surroundings in France, including landscapes, churches, and graveyards.

Groover was the subject of a short film by photographer Tina Barney entitled (Jan Groover: Tilting at Space, 1994).

In a New York Times review of her work exhibited at Janet Borden Inc., New York, in 1997, critic Roberta Miller called Groover's work "beautiful and masterly in the extreme."

She died in 2012, having been ill for some time.

Groover's work is held in the permanent collections of the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Museum of Fine Arts Houston.