Yates, Steve: Betty Hahn, Photography or Maybe Not

University of New Mexico Press

1995

First Edition

Betty Hahn has been making photographs for over thirty years. But, as this mid-career retrospective shows, she is not a photographer in any strict sense; she is a designer, a painter, a director, a detective, and an innovator. Never one to be constrained by the boundaries, Betty Hahn has been a key person in the revival of nineteenth-century nonsilver processes like gum bichromate and Van Dyke printing. In her early work, she experimented with photographic imagery on fabric with stitching and with photographs made with a toy camera, and she was among the first artists to work with the 20 x 24 Polaroid camera. Her extended series of images of the Lone Ranger is one of her best known, but this book shows her to be a prolific artist of wide-ranging interests and talents.