Thomas H. Hahn Docu-Images: Featured Galleries and Collections

Colors & flowers, from summer to fall 花的颜色

th.hahn@gmail.com (Thomas H. Hahn Docu-Images) — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 20:30:38 GMT

A gallery of transitional colors, from summer to fall. Photographs were mostly taken with the Fuji S5 and the Zeiss 100mm, with a couple of exceptions (Nikon D2X, Leica D-Lux 4, and Olympus 8080). The Zeiss does enormously well on the Fuji.

Processing was done in Adobe Lightroom or Capture One 4.

Thomas Hahn
Ithaca, NY
September 2009

Serendipity collection 撒散图片库

th.hahn@gmail.com (Thomas H. Hahn Docu-Images) — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 04:26:12 GMT

A collection of chance encounters, accidents, and discoveries. A couple of these pictures are arranged ("staged"), otherwise things were left alone and just slightly recontextualized. Against usual (somewhat harried) practice, with these photographs I did pay a bit more attention to exposure and composition.

Taken in the following locations:
Norwich, upstate New York.
New York City, Battery Park.
San Francisco.
Beijing, China.
Sanya, Hainan Island, China.
Bar Harbor, Maine.
Rockland, Massachussetts.
Ithaca, upstate New York.
Paris, France.
Sergiev Posad, Russia.
Marburg, Germany.

In contrast to my other collections and galleries, this collection is not serialized or homogeneous in any way. Cameras and gear differ considerably, from medium format to digital.

First images uploaded September 18, 2006. Last update Dec. 27, 2007.

Thomas H. Hahn, Ithaca, NY

Serendipity collection II (Monochromes)

th.hahn@gmail.com (Thomas H. Hahn Docu-Images) — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 01:04:36 GMT

A small collection of b/w (monochrome) photographs, taken over a considerable period of time, with very different equipment, such as Hasselblad, Nikon film and Nikon digital, the Ricoh GRD2 and Olympus.

The play with light and shadows is what makes the development of photographs in black and white so exciting.

For portraits and people shots in b/w please visit http://hahn.zenfolio.com/p193233205/ .

Thomas H. Hahn
Ithaca, NY

Moving on - Abandoned homes in upstate New York

th.hahn@gmail.com (Thomas H. Hahn Docu-Images) — Wed, 27 May 2009 12:15:11 GMT

Upstate New York is a rather troubled area. Geographically speaking, the term includes the following wider areas:
- Buffalo
- Rochester
- Syracuse
- Albany
- Watertown
- Utica
- Binghamton
This listing encompasses the scenic Fingerlakes Region; most of the photographs in this gallery originate from here.

With economic growth lagging well behind the national average, even in a good year, it is no surprise that upstate is deficient in a variety of ways. The region suffers severe job losses, transformation of good land to fallow land, scores of farms going out of business, abandoned homes, trailer parks that litter the (still very scenic) landscape, low industrial output, fragmented cityscapes, southward migration, the walmartization of its retail infrastructure, and so on. It's been that way for a while. A report by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York published in 1999 gives upstate low marks for economic performance even in times when the rest of the state and indeed the entire country was pulling ahead with much higher GDP numbers. There is no reason to be nostalgic, however. Upstate is a rugged place. People conduct their affairs in a straightforward manner. It is stating the obvious that New York state's most competitive asset in the global economy lies "downstream", in Manhattan. For those in charge, it would be wise - for once - to "look the other way" again and discover what upstate can contribute in the context of industrial and agricultural production.

Thomas H. Hahn
Ithaca, NY

Chinese artists and the city 近代城市化与当代艺术家

th.hahn@gmail.com (Thomas H. Hahn Docu-Images) — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 20:48:39 GMT

Metropolis Magazine recently (Nov. 1, 2007) printed an interview with urban planner Sun Huasheng 孙骅声 (if you do not know Sun Huasheng, think Shenzhen urban development from 1980 to today). In this interview, Sun states: "I usually say that an architect or planner who wants to do urban design, if they neglect people’s movement and their feelings, their work is without any soul. In a word, it must be people-oriented because the soul of urban design is people." While this may sound obvious, the reality of urban planning in contemporary China is in fact quite the opposite, and - given Weng Peijun's striking images of Shenzhen as a place of defragmentation and functionalized desolation - Sun's words strike me as almost preposterous.
This gallery of photographs (most of which were taken in various galleries in China in the past 5 years) includes many artists as critical of urbanization as Weng. Obviously, modes of expression differ: the Gao Brothers use the naked body as the last line of defense against an environment which increasingly becomes ungovernable. Zhou Jun's b/w photographs of Beijing's structures, partially dipped in red as if the site was bleeding, are striking examples of how profound the body and the soul of the city of Beijing are affected by change. Song Feel, a Korean artist working in Beijing, places a person not unlike Rodin's Thinker on top of a large pole sticking out of a Beijing map. He can't make sense of the place obviously. And Hong Haochang needs to bring his Yunnan color palette to Beijing in order to create a visual narrative of Tiananmen Square which is striking both in its degrees of reverence and distortion. Yang Xiaobing (theorizing about the effect of urban noise, Miao Xiaochun, Daniel Lee are included here, too, as is Song Dong with his extremely interesting installation of the house of his deceased father, displaying all belongings that once were his, thus reminding us of the specific spatial and ecological footprint of a previous generation.

Thomas H. Hahn
Ithaca, NY, November 30, 2007 (updated April 8,. 2009)