Haas, Ernst.The Creation, New York: Viking Press, 1971;
New York: Penguin Books, 1976; Dusseldorf: Econ Ver-
lag, 1971; New York: Viking Press, Revised 2nd Edition,
1983.
Haas, Ernst.In America. New York: Viking Press, 1975.
Haas, Ernst,In Germany. New York: The New York, 1977;
Dusseldorf: Econ Verlag, 1976.
Haas, Ernst, and Gisela Minke.Himalayan Pilgrimage.
New York: Viking Press, 1978.
Haas, The Estate of Ernst and Bondi, Inge, and Ruth A.
Peltason, eds.Ernst Haas Colour Photography. New
York: Harry N. Abrams Inc., 1989.
Haas, Alexander and Jim Hughes.Ernst Haas in Black and
White. Boston: Bulfinch Press, 1992.BETTY HAHN
American
Betty Hahn’s work is characterized by her relentless
experimentation with technical processes and sub-
ject matter, and the endearing sense of wit and
humor so pervasive in her pictures. These same
qualities keep her from being typecast as a ‘‘moder-
nist’’ or ‘‘feminist’’ or some other category of pho-
tographer constrained to a particular ideology. Her
work is recognizable in that it has no one ‘‘signa-
ture’’ appearance. Hahn has experimented with dif-
ferent cameras—plastic toy cameras, 35-mm
cameras, the 2024-inch Polaroid camera—and
different photographic and non-photographic pro-
cesses, including gum bichromate prints on paper
and fabric, collotypes, cyanotypes, cibachromes, as
well as gelatin silver prints, and woodcuts, serigra-
phy (silkscreening), lithography, trapunto (a stuffed
quilting technique), and ceramics—to realize her
aesthetic ideas. She was a pioneer in the 1960s and
1970s, along with such figures as Bea Nettles,
Robert Heinecken, and Thomas Barrow, in working
with various non-silver methods at a time when
straight black-and-white photography, much of it
documentary, was the only kind of art photography
taken seriously.
Hahn was born in Chicago in the fall of 1940 and
attended Catholic schools during most of her
youth. She showed artistic talent from an early
age, and many of the recurring themes and motifs
which form her aesthetic signature—horses, flow-
ers, crime, and mystery—first surfaced when she
was a young girl. A drawing of two horses Hahn
rendered when she was 10 years old was published
inChildren’s Playmate Magazine, and she received
about 200 fan letters as a result. In 1954, she read
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’sThe Complete Sherlock
Holmes, beginning her interest in crime and mys-
tery. And when she was 17, she received her first
award, the Hallmark Honor Prize, for a small
watercolor landscape. Unlike many adults, Hahn
never narrowed her wide-ranging childhood inter-
ests, and she made her career out of experimenting
with both subject and process.
Her formal art education took place at Indiana
University in Bloomfield, Michigan, where she
completed both her Bachelor of Arts and Master
of Fine Arts degrees in 1963 and 1966, respectively,
under the guidance of Henry Holmes Smith. Smith
had worked with La ́szlo ́ Moholy-Nagy, whose
work in the 1920s and 1930s had pushed many
aesthetic and technical boundaries. Smith encour-
aged Hahn to do the same, and in 1965 she made
her first gum bichromate prints. Without imitating
Smith’s work, or that of Andy Warhol or Robert
Rauschenberg, two artists she admired and whose
images influenced her, she developed her own
unique style.
After graduate school, she taught design and
photography at the National Institute for the Deaf
at Rochester Institute of Technology, and later in
1970, transferred to RIT’s School of Photographic
Arts and Sciences, where she taught until 1975. In
the winter of 1976, Betty Hahn was hired by Van
Deren Coke to teach photography in the Depart-
ment of Art and Art History at the University of
New Mexico in Albuquerque. The department
faculty then included Tom Barrow, Rod Lazorik,
and the already famous historian of photography,
Beaumont Newhall. She retired in 1997.
Hahn has drawn and continues to draw upon her
travel experiences, domestic situations, daily cir-
cumstances, and art history for her subjects.
Though her techniques may change from projectHAHN, BETTY