Transformational Imagemaking: Handmade Photography Since 1960

Betty Hahn

MFA, INDIANA UNIVERSITY BLOOMINGTON, 1966

BA, INDIANA UNIVERSITY BLOOMINGTON, 1963

In the late 1960s, Betty Hahn (b. 1940) continued to ponder the questions Henry Holmes Smith asked her as a student: “What should a photograph look like?” “Why are the limits of photography the way they are? Who put them there?” Robert W. Fichter recalls: “Betty and I were both in Smith’s class when he brought in a letter by Robert F. Forth urging twentieth-century artists to go back and ‘mine the past’ for antique processes. Henry told us to pick one process and explore it. Betty took up gum printing and the rest is history.” Such reflections also led Hahn to experiment with methods customarily associated with women, such as sewing machine stitching ...