to project, familiar themes appear and reappear.
Since 1970, she has rendered flowers, gardens, and
botanical studies in needlepoint and watercolor,
and also as Polaroids, monotypes, silkscreens, and
gum bichromate prints. She has also made color
lithographs, embellishing many of these with what-
ever materials are at hand including spray paint,
felt-tip markers, and instant coffee. In pursuing
her interest in themes of crime and mystery, she
has followed and documented a stranger through-
out streets in London inObservations of British In-
telligence, 1981; collected and photographed
household items destroyed by her Borzoi puppy in
Crime in the Home1982; and constructed simulated
crime scenes that she then recorded inScenes of
Crime1979. Hahn has also given new life to images
appropriated from other sources, masterfully illu-
strated in her long-running Lone Rangerseries,
which she began in 1974. Initially inspired by an
image that she found in a stationery store—an 8
10-inch glossy black-and-white Hollywood still
photograph—she has altered the iconic figures of
the Lone Ranger and his companion Tonto using
silkscreen, duo tones, Van Dyke prints, and photo-
lithography. Many of the finished works are color-
ful and humorous. Silver stars and toy bullets,
flocking, Sanka brand instant coffee, and pastels
adorn various works in this series. Her titles for
these images, Who Was That Masked Man? I
Wanted to Thank Him, Starry Night, andPhantom
Stallion, to name just a few, are as unique as her
alterations, and they reflect her wry sense of humor.
David Haberstitch, curator of photography at
the National Museum of American History, Smith-
sonian Institution, and graduate student classmate
at Indiana University, has summarized Betty
Hahn’s aesthetic sensibility and her career up to
the present. Writing for the monograph that accom-
panied Hahn’s 1995 retrospective, he stated that:
...there is a beauty and unity in Hahn’s work that renders
it a satisfying, multifaceted, intricately interconnected
exposition of photography, its traditions, its role in our
lives and its surprising affinities with other arts. More
than any other artist, in my mind she summarizes, reca-
pitulates, almost embodies, the history of photography.
(Steve Yates, David Haberstitch, Dana Asbury,Betty
Hahn: Photography or Maybe Not, Albuquerque:
University of New Mexico Press 1995, 17)
Betty Hahn continues to live and to work in
Albuquerque, New Mexico.
MICHELEPenhallSeealso: Camera: An Overview; Camera: Diana;
Coke, Van Deren; Heinecken, Robert; La ́szlo ́;Manip-
ulation; Moholy-Nagy; Newhall, Beaumont; Non-Sil-
ver Processes; Print Processes; Rauschenberg, RobertBiography
Born Betty Jean Okon in Chicago, Illinois on 11 October- She received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1963 and
a Master of Fine Arts degree in 1966, both from Indiana
University, where she studied under Henry Holmes
Smith. In 1967, she moved to Rochester, New York
and met Roger Mertin, Bea Nettles, Tom Barrow, and
Nathan Lyons. Hahn taught photography and design to
deaf students at the National Institute for the Deaf,
Rochester Institute of Technology in 1969. She was
hired as a visiting artist by Van Deren Coke in January
1976 at the University of New Mexico, and in August
that year accepted a full-time tenured position there to
teach photography. She retired from the University in - Her numerous awards include: a grant from the
New York State Council on the Arts in 1975; National
Endowment for the Arts fellowships in 1978 and 1983;
Honored Educator award from the Society for Photo-
graphic Education in 1984 and 2000, a fellowship from
the Visual Arts Research Institute at Arizona State Uni-
versity in 1987; a Polaroid fellowship in 1988. Betty
Hahn lives and works in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Selected Works
Road and Rainbow, 1971
Soft Daguerreotype, 1973
Who Was That Masked Man? I Wanted To Thank Him
1974–1979
Passing Shots, 1975–1986
Cut Flowers, 1978–1987
Botanical Layouts, 1978–1980
Crime and Intrigue Series, 1979–1982
Shinjuku, 1984
B Westerns, 1991Selected Individual Exhibitions
1973 Witkin Gallery; New York, New York
1995 Betty Hahn: Photography or Maybe Not; a thirty-year
retrospective organized by the Museum of Fine Arts,
Santa Fe, New Mexico. Traveled to the International
Museum of Photography and Film, George Eastman
House in Rochester, New York, the Marble Palace in
St. Petersburg, Russia and Granada, SpainSelected Group Exhibitions
1967 Photography Since 1950; International Museum of
Photography at George Eastman House, Rochester,
New York
1969 The Photograph as Object; National Gallery of
Canada, Ottawa
1970 The Camera and the Human Fac ̧ade; Smithsonian
Institution, Washington, D.C.
Photography: New Acquisitions; Museum of Modern
Art, New York, New York
1971 Contemporary Photographs; Museum of Modern
Art, New York, New YorkHAHN, BETTY