Frank Hamrick
Harder than writing a good haiku  

Media: Artist's Book 

Artist Statement:
For the steadfast hills
of Whites Creek, Tennessee and
the fight to save them

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Once I had a graduate student who was having trouble successfully making tintypes. I did not know the process, nor did any of the other professors I worked with at the time. So I bought a tintype kit over the winter break and began learning the nineteenth century method. 

My first tintypes were primarily straight forward portraits with non-obtrusive backgrounds. The images clearly identified the sitter and were easily readable. Over time the subject matter expanded to include still life compositions and landscapes. Eventually the barriers between these photographic categories started to disappear. The most interesting tintypes were those that suggested something beyond what was evidently shown. The goal shifted away from telling viewers exactly what to see, to pointing the audience in a direction while leaving the destination an open ended mystery. 

All processes, tools and materials have characteristics they imbed into the finished image. Tintypes are made with long exposures lasting anywhere from a second to several minutes. This process forces myself, the sitter and viewers to consider time differently than most of us usually would when making or looking at photographs captured in a split second via contemporary tools and methods.

The phrase “Harder than writing a good haiku” was an analogy I spoke of while helping another artist edit their work to a manageable number of images while leaving enough to still convey the original concept.

These photographs, originally created as 8”x10” and 8”x8” tintypes, were conceived as select moments from stories where the hint of a narrative open to the viewers’ interpretation is more important than the specifics of the characters’ identities or where they are located. The scenes depicted are designed to engage whether they are totally familiar or curiously exotic, depending on each viewer’s background.

Biography

Oxford American Magazine and NPR have written about Frank Hamrick’s art. His work is housed in institutions including The Amon Carter Museum of American Art, The Art Institute of Chicago, The Griffin Museum of Photography, The Ogden Museum of Southern Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art, London. Frank is a professor and the MFA graduate program coordinator at Louisiana Tech University in Ruston and has also taught at the Penland School of Craft in North Carolina as well as the University of Georgia’s study abroad program in Cortona, Italy. His photography has been featured on magazine, book and record covers, including Gillian Welch and David Rawlings’ Americana album Nashville Obsolete. Born in Georgia, Frank’s handmade books combine photography and storytelling with papermaking and letterpress printing to address time, relationships and home. Frank’s limited edition artist’s book of tintype images Harder than writing a good haiku earned the 2017 Houston Center for Photography Fellowship and was awarded first place in the 2017 Los Angeles Festival of Photography’s Photobook Competition.