Betty Hahn Biography: Photographer and Professor

Early life and education

Betty Hahn was born Elizabeth Okon in Chicago in October 1940. When she was about ten, an aunt, Marcella Brown, gave her a Brownie camera, and the family relocated to Indianapolis around the same time. After finishing at Scecina Memorial Catholic High School she won a four-year scholarship to Indiana University in Bloomington and studied fine arts. Painting and drawing came first; photography was something she only tried out occasionally.

Finding her direction

She completed her bachelor’s degree at 23 and stayed on at Indiana for graduate work in photography under Henry Holmes Smith. He recommended that she try the gum bichromate process, and he persuaded her that photography deserved to be taken seriously. That conversation shaped the rest of her career. In his department she also met Robert Fichter, who appeared in some of her first photographic projects and remained an influence.

Rochester years

In 1967 Hahn moved to Rochester, New York, hoping to find work with Kodak or Xerox. She joined Nathan Lyons’s evening workshop in 1967 and 1968, where talk of vernacular and snapshot photography strengthened her interest in folk traditions. Her circle there included Joan Lyons, Jim Borcoman, Tom Barrow, Roger Mertin, Bea Nettles and Alice Wells, and she renewed her friendship with Fichter. What attracted her was the way these artists tested the conventions of fine-print photography.

Her teaching began at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf, newly opened in partnership with the Rochester Institute of Technology, where she taught photography and design. A year later she moved to RIT’s School of Photographic Arts and Sciences and remained until 1975.

Gallery recognition and grants

In 1972 Hahn met Lee Witkin at a function at the George Eastman House. Her first solo exhibition opened at the Witkin Gallery in New York in 1973. A National Endowment for the Arts grant in 1974 funded a term as visiting artist at Franconia College in New Hampshire, where she pursued non-silver and mixed-media projects.

New Mexico

At 35 she was hired as a visiting professor of photography at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, and she joined the permanent faculty in 1976. Further NEA grants followed in 1978 and 1983. She became a full professor in the spring of 1986 and taught there until she retired in 1997.

Collections

Her photographs are held by many museums, among them the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. A fuller account appears on the private collections page and the university collections page. The biographical text archived on the original site was credited to Fumiko Koizumi and colleagues.

For the artwork itself, see the portfolios.