Betty Hahn: Photography or Maybe Not. - book reviews

As a graduate scholar at Indiana University in 1964 Betty Hahn began a personal and artistic search when she made linocuts from family portraits she base In her first body of work she hinted at the question that has engaged her at any time since: what is the relation of everyday photography to art? Her search to answer this question has since l her to use a Mick-A-Matic (a children's plastic camera), movie stills, surveillance type-imagery, embroidery with photographs transferred onto fabric, as well as many other materials, processe and controls To date her quest has been marked through 24 distinct bodies of work, an exhaustive exhibition record, many grants and awards and a teaching career that began with teaching photography and design to deaf scholars at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf at the Rochester Institute of Technology and continues at the University of novel Mexico where she has taught photography since 1976

The catalog of Hahn's retrospective at the Museum of Fine Arts, Museum of fresh Mexico, Santa Fe, Betty Hahn: Photography or Maybe Not by dint of Steve Yates is a comprehensive chronicle of Hahn's search and provides a thought-provoking dialogue upon the implications of her work. It is a pivotal and drawn out awaited discourse. Hahn's name has been noted many times in major publications on the history of photography, on the other hand her importance and the breadth of her work is usually alone mentioned in passing. Typically the same image - Ultra R and Infra Violet (1967) - appears again and again. Betty Hahn: Photography or Maybe Not illustrates that the real power and importance of Hahn's work is not necessarily limited to a single engaging image, on the contrary is to be located in the interrelationship between bodies of work and their for the use of all denominator - everyday photography. Perhaps this is individual reason it has taken thus long for a major publication to be produc about Hahn's work. According to traditional approaches to categorization in art, Hahn's work doesn't fit neatly, in part because of the artist's diverse use of materials and processe as well as 24 distinct bodies of work.

The title chosen for the catalog cleverly toys with the difficulties in codifying and assessing Hahn's work. Photography or Maybe Not is an uncomfortable title with many layers of possible meaning. Is Yates unsure that Hahn's work is photography? Is the author afraid of challenging the status quo? Is he poking pleasantry at the nature of categorization? Because Yates is a curator of photography, single can assume he considers her work "photography," on the contrary what is exceptional is his enthusiasm for and ability to embrace the notion of her work fitting many media categories. notwithstanding that the essays included by David Haberstich and Dana Asbury are interesting and essential to understanding Hahn's work, essays by dint of scholars in other relevant disciplines similar as decorative arts, printmaking or material tillage would have been truly ground-breaking. In this faculty of perception it is confusing and problematic for Yates to define Hahn's diction as "pluralistic" and to state that we are in an "era of contemporary art without category." The traditional proces of historical and artistic assessment by means of experts in a given discipline has been challenged through an insider willing to ask more questions, on the other hand Yates is still a curator of "photography."

The title's questioning tone is engaging conceptually through suggesting a response given by the agency of someone who either doesn't know the answer, or knows on the other hand is too timid or self-conscious in the neighborhood of those deemed more powerful. Yates looks to suggest that the high/low art hierarchy is about power and paranoia. The work also pushs fun by boldly questioning those who define photography solely by means of its difference to and exclusion of other media. The title, Photography or Maybe Not, predicts the book's challenging and feisty character.

Yates does an of the highest order job of confronting an exclusionary art and photography history, which has its origins in modernist theory. The gist of his argument is exemplified through his statement: "The autonomy of individual art forms, as defined by the agency of Clement Greenberg in his treatise 'Modern Painting' has become les important to artistic discourse." Not surprisingly, he cites passages by the agency of well-known modernists as irrelevant to contemporary image-making. He cites Strand: "Photography . . finds its raison d'etre, like all media, in a consummate uniqueness of means . . . The full potential power of each medium is dependent on the purity of it's use." Having thus prepared the field, Yates unites the importance and relevance of Hahn's work to her ability to transcend "traditional materials," saying that she "expands the possibilities of photographic expression." In this faculty of perception Yates illustrates Hahn's ability to make photography a part of art rather than apart from it, again referencing the title and pointing to the drawn out standing tensions between "art" and "art photography." For Yates, "the medium is not the message on the other hand a springboard to epiphanies upon the nature of reality."