Betty Hahn: Photography or Maybe Not

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.

Curator Steve Yates presents Betty Hahn as one in a distinguished line of free-thinking artists of the twentieth century who have paid no attention to the traditional boundaries of their media and whose style can only be described as pluralistic. In addition to two essays examining the unfolding of her talents and many influences on her work, this book includes a complete catalogue of her work to date.

Those familiar with the wit and mystery of Betty Hahn's oeuvre will be delighted to see it collected here in one volume. Anyone interested in innovations in twentieth-century photography will want to read this book.