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Elizabeth Jean Okon (born October 11, 1940) American photographer and multi-media artist born in Chicago, Illinois. She is best known as a leader in the revival of historic photographic techniques, her interest in vernacular photography and appropriation, and multi-media approach to the medium of photography. Hahn's aunt, Marcella Brown, gave her a Brownie #2 camera in 1950. Beginning in 1958, she studied art at [Indiana University, Bloomington]] where she worked closely with Henry Holmes Smith for eight years, earning an A.B. degree in Art in 1963 and an M.F.A. in Photography in 1966. While there, Hahn also studied art history with Henry Hope and Albert Elsen, design with George Sadek, and printmaking with Rudy Pozzarri. In 1967 she moved to Rochester, New York and worked as a social worker for two years while pursuing photography and participates in Nathan Lyon's 1967-68 class at the Visual Studies Workshop. In 1969, Hahn began teaching photography and design to deaf students at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf at the Rochester Institute of Technology. In 1970 she transfers to RIT's School of Photographic Arts and Sciences where she continued to teach until 1975. Invited by Van Deren Coke to be a visiting professor in photography at the University of New Mexico, Hahn moved to Albuquerque in January 1976 and in June accepted a full-time position as an associate professor, achieving full professor in 1986. She retired from that position in 200x. Among her influences are Man Ray, Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol.

Works

Her earliest work uses family album imagery an appropriated photographs...In 1976, Hahn began using a "Mick-A-Matic" plastic camera to make photographs, prefiguring the popularity among artists of the Diana camera and other toy cameras. Hahn had an opportunity to use the large-format Polaroid camera when it came to Albuquerque in 19xx... Hahn's attraction to the subject of the great American hero led to an extended exploration of the iconic Lone Ranger and Tonto in a series of work. Scene of a Crime... series... flowers...botanical layouts, fragile and feminine, art historical tradition

Exhibitions

Hahn had her first one-person exhibition at the Witkin Gallery in New York City in 1973. A retrospective of her work was presented at the Fine Arts Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico (now the Museum of Fine Arts) in 1995 with an accompanying book

Awards

National Endowment for the Arts, 1974 and 1983 Honored Educator Award, Society for Photographic Education, 1984

Publications

Yates, Steve, with David Haberstich and Dana Asbury, "Betty Hahn: Photography or Maybe Not," University of New Mexico Press, 1995.

Public Collections

Museum of Modern Art, New York Smithsonian International Museum of Photography/George Eastman House Indiana University The Art Institute of Chicago New Mexico Museum of Art Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, France

"The picture was no longer synonymous with the subject because I could manipulate the process and exercise some intellectual control over those details recorded by the camera while incorporating other ideas. Photographic information could be provided where details were included, or it could remain hidden where details were obscured."

References

Category:1940 births Category:Living Persons Category:Photographer Category:women photographers Category:Artists from Chicago Category:Indiana University alumni Category:Artists from Albuquerque, New Mexico Category:Artists of the American West Category:University of New Mexico faculty Category:Rochester Institute of Technology faculty