Barbara Young ’45 not only made a difference in the lives of the patients she treated during her half-century as a psychiatrist, but also in the art world, where her pioneering work in color photography hangs in museums all over the country. She died of cancer in Baltimore on Sept. 28, just shy of her 102nd birthday.
After completing medical school at Johns Hopkins, Young pursued her psychiatric residency here, finishing in 1949. She then worked for two years as a staff psychiatrist at the Perry Point VA Medical Center in northeast Maryland before starting her own private practice, according to The Baltimore Sun, which reported that she graduated from the Baltimore Psychoanalytic Institute in 1953.
Young focused her career on psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapy and was a part-time faculty member at Johns Hopkins until 1993, after which she continued in an emeritus capacity. She practiced until 2008, according to The Baltimore Sun.
In the early 1960s, she began a habit of spending three months away from her practice each year to focus on photography and writing, earning distinction as a pioneer in the use of color photography. Her work can be found in New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art in California, the Yale University Art Gallery and others.
“She made an enormous difference for the hundreds of patients she treated over the years,” says James Potash, director of the Johns Hopkins Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences. “More broadly, her photography had an impact, both aesthetically and psychologically, on the many people who had the chance to see her work in her books, in her lectures and in museums throughout the country.”
Young donated seven of her photos to Johns Hopkins, which were hung in 2015 on the fifth floor of the Nelson/Harvey Building.
One of her most celebrated works, Uffizi Landing, which depicts two boats docked in a vast expanse of water, inspired a letter from a young photographer, who “realized that she wanted to be that little blue boat docked safely in all that water,” Young wrote. The photographer wrote, “The picture is proof that I will make it to a safe place; quite the best feeling I’ve had in a long time.”
