Introduction

I grew up with photography: my father (Erich Hartmann, 1922-99) was a professional photojournalist, and from him I learned about the balance between technical quality and artistic perception that makes a good photograph.

I shot my first roll of film when I was six years old. My first professional assignment came in 1967 when I photographed, for publication in his advertisements, the handiwork of a maker of custom automobile convertible tops whose shop was across the alley from where we lived in London. In graduate school I earned part of my stipend documenting archaeological excavations, making record shots of artifacts for publications and lectures, and taking photomicrographs. In 1984 I embarked on my career as a freelance translator of technical and scientific documents, and since then my photographic work has been entirely personal.

 

The pictures

Many of the pictures shown here are about movement and passage and progression: I am fascinated by doorways, paths, streets, walking figures -- visual elements that invite the viewer's eye to leave the bounded space of the image and go elsewhere. Please look at the pictures to take your own journey.

My photographs have been published in archaeological journals and in magazines such as Omni and Photo Techniques, in the Sunday magazine of the Chicago Tribune (this picture, on January 29, 1995), and as one of twelve selected from numerous submissions for the Milwaukee Art Museum's 2003 calendar (this picture; the "model" is my mother, Ruth Bains Hartmann). My work has been exhibited at Leica Gallery in New York City and at Gallery H2O in Milwaukee, and one print is now in the collection of the Milwaukee Art Museum. Most pleasing to me is the knowledge that my pictures appear on the walls and mantelpieces of friends and family all over the world.

 

Technique

The pictures on this site were taken with black-and-white film in a 35mm rangefinder or single-lens reflex camera. After processing the film, I scanned the resulting negatives to generate Photoshop files, remove dust spots and adjust tonalities, and made prints onto archival paper using an inkjet printer and pigment-based carbon-black ink. A detailed discussion of this technique, in the form of a two-part online interview, appears in Mike Johnston's "Sunday Morning Photographer" column, on the Luminous Landscape site (part 1 and part 2) and at Steve's Digicams (part 1 and part 2). The interviews have also been translated into Polish for Lukasz Kacperczyk's Fotopolis site ("Internetowy magazyn o fotografii"), again as part 1 and part 2.

A detailed and rigorous approach to black-only printing, using more up-to-date Epson printers, has now been formulated by Clayton Jones, whose site also includes a small gallery of very nice pictures.

 My workflow is now (as of 2006) entirely digital, and for the limited number of black-and-white prints that I still make, I use Roy Harrington's excellent QuadTone RIP product for the Epson 2200 printer.

Acknowledgments

My father's influence on me as a photographer and a human being was paramount; please click here to learn more about him and his pictures.

I have also been impressed and inspired by the work of three of his Magnum colleagues:

Charles Harbutt. His book of photographs (and powerful text) called Travelog first revealed to me that pictures of everyday surroundings could evoke mystery and terror.

Josef Koudelka. My father greatly admired him and his personal and visual courage. The finest of his photographs -- of industrial decay, a child's face, or a landscape -- are viscerally thrilling.

Henri Cartier-Bresson. The artistic godfather of every black-and-white photographer: 70 years ago he invented the idea of walking around taking pictures with an unobtrustive little camera, and his ability to balance emotional impact and geometry in an arrangement of shades of gray has never been equaled.

Two other photographers on the Web are showing black-and-white work that appeals to me:

John Brownlow, whose "Human Traffic" collection of London street pictures is quietly hair-raising; and

Michael Hintlian, who has sympathetically documented life in Armenia as well as the gargantuan "Big Dig" construction project in central Boston.

Last by not least, for the last fourteen years Mike Johnston has generously given me criticism and encouragement, as a photographic editor and writer and as a good friend. His contributions to Michael Reichmann's Luminous Landscape site about photography, and his own engaging The Online Photographer blog, are always worth reading.