Morgan is known in the visual art and dance worlds for her penetrating studies of American modern dancers Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham, Erick Hawkins, José Limón, Doris Humphrey, Charles Weidman and others.

While a student, Johnson read from the Chinese Six Canons of Painting, about “rhythmic vitality”, or essence of life force, described as the artist's goal of expression.

This concept related directly to her father's teaching that all things are made of “dancing atoms,” and remained a guiding philosophy throughout her life as an artist.

In 1929, Los Angeles Times critic Arthur Miller wrote: “One of the finest sets of prints in the show is that by Barbara Morgan, and these chance also to be the most abstract works here.

Barbara assisted Willard in photographing the modern architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright and Richard Neutra, including a full documentation of the building of the Lovell House.

Weston's rich, brilliant prints of Californian and Mexican subject matter “rang the bell” for her when she was hanging this show at UCLA, although she found them "too static for [her] own style".

[4] In response to Willard's Leica-illustrated articles, E. Leitz, Inc. offered him a job publicizing the new 35mm camera, and the couple moved to New York City in the summer of 1930.

After one year traveling the east with Willard, Barbara set up a printmaking studio in 1931 on 23rd street opposite Washington Square Park in New York City.

Out of this subject matter, symbolic forms emerged and she began to paint more abstractly, exhibiting her new work in a solo show at the Mellon Gallery in Philadelphia.

While photographing a Sudan fertility icon and an Ivory Coast totemic mask, Barbara discovered that she could make these ritual sculptures seem either menacing or benign, simply by control of lighting.

She was immediately struck with the historical and social importance of the emerging American Modern Dance movement: “The photographers and painters who dealt with the Depression, often, it seemed to me, only added to defeatism without giving courage or hope.

These included Valerie Bettis, Merce Cunningham, Jane Dudley, Erick Hawkins, Hanya Holm, Doris Humphrey, José Limón, Sophie Maslow, May O'Donnell, Pearl Primus, Anna Sokolow, Helen Tamiris, and Charles Weidman.

In 1980, Graham stated: “It is rare that even an inspired photographer possesses the demonic eye which can capture the instant of dance and transform it into timeless gesture.

Beaumont Newhall, of George Eastman House praised the work stating, “Her sensitive photographs, skillfully combined with words, capture the world of youth with heartiness and tenderness, humor and sympathy.

In 1943 at the request of Josef Albers, Barbara Morgan sent 24 photographs for an exhibition at Black Mountain College to accompany a lecture he was presenting on photography.

“I'm not just a 'photographer' or a 'painter,'” she asserted, “but a visually aware human being searching out ways to communicate the intensities of life.”[22] She possessed an innate capacity for close associations and lasting friendships with some of the most creative minds of her time, exchanging letters with Edward Weston, Gordon Parks, Margaret Mead, Buckminster Fuller, Joseph Campbell, William Carlos Williams, Dorothea Lange, Stuart Davis, Richard Neutra, and Charles Sheeler, among many others.

“How wonderful to behold a person who has developed all of these capacities because of her practice of living as a whole being,” Minor White wrote in the introduction to a 1964 issue of Aperture dedicated to her work.