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Photographs by Harlan Hambright
Motorcycle, Rome, 1972
"This was taken during a summer while studying architecture in Italy. It appears in the book Family of Woman."
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Photographs by Harlan Hambright
Sidewalk, Rome, 1972
"Taken on the same trip to Rome, I anticipated this photograph and began following the young woman. This happened within the first 30 seconds."
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Photographs by Harlan Hambright
Fisherman, Holston River, 1975
"A study in light and timing, this was taken on a Sunday drive in the country while I was living in Knoxville."
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Photographs by Harlan Hambright
Busboy, 1975
"Another light study taken at a diner in Knoxville that had Venetian blinds."
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Photographs by Harlan Hambright
Bridge Fog, Causeway 2012
"Saw this phenomenon on the causeway while driving to Brunswick early one morning. Made a U-turn and ran to the top of a bridge to capture it with a very long telephoto lens."
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Photographs by Harlan Hambright
Ben Hensley, 1976
"This was for a book a Knoxville author was doing on East Tennessee country fiddlers. A picking session was going on inside."
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Photographs by Harlan Hambright
Velda Rose, Knoxville, 1976
"A common building that I shot with my large format view camera to capture the lighting and detail."
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Photographs by Harlan Hambright
Mr. Arley Roach, East Tennessee, 1979
"While driving around the countryside on Sunday, I happened upon these colorful gas pumps. After setting up my large camera, the proprietor came outside to see what I was up to and I talked him into posing."
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Photographs by Harlan Hambright
Artist at Work
This photo shows the lengths to which Harlan will go to get the shot he wants.
In mid-January, “Light & Shadow” a retrospective exhibit of more than 40 years’ worth of photographs by Harlan Hambright opens at Art Downtown, 1413 Newcastle St. in Historic Downtown Brunswick. Hambright has been a St. Simons resident since 1990, and is a partner with h2o creative group.
Upon graduation from the University of Tennessee’s school of architecture in 1976, Hambright became a professional architectural photographer out of necessity, because, he recalls, “not unlike recent times, there were no jobs in architecture in the mid-70s. I had been seriously into photography since high school and managed to pay my way through college doing freelance work, so it was a natural transition.” Combining his photography skills with his architectural studies, he set off on a path of architectural photography and never looked back.
This exhibit will feature Hambright’s favorite photographs rather than his professional work however. “My personal work can be put into 3 categories,” he explained. “First, I have always been taken by the way light and shadow and reflections can produce unusual effects. I cannot pass a weird shadow without trying to capture it.” The second category relates to his professional work in that he uses the same equipment and techniques: “I really appreciate vernacular architecture. When I’m traveling and come across a captivating structure, if the light is right, I’ll stop.” The third theme is “just weird stuff I see.” For instance, a nativity scene composed of Coca Cola boxes. “I don’t typically shoot sunsets and waterfalls and flowers,” he said, “there are millions of those already.”
Hambright’s interest in photography was inadvertently spawned by his father. He explains, “I was riding with my dad on I-40 in about the eighth grade. On the horizon was a row of TVA smoke stacks. We approached them for a while, then passed them. The second they disappeared below the horizon behind us, he asked, ‘How many smokestacks were there?’ I answered correctly. ‘How many were smoking?’ After that I started looking at everything on the outside chance I was going to be grilled on something. Then I started to actually see things, interesting things. I thought I needed to do something about the things I was seeing. I visited a good friend who had a darkroom in his basement and I was hooked.” Since that time, he never lived anywhere he did not have immediate access to a darkroom--until 1999 when he transitioned to digital technology.
“Digital photography was pretty rough getting started,” he recalls, “but it has really come into its own in the past couple of years.” In preparing for this exhibit he is printing recent digital work and scanning old negatives including large format ones. “There’s nothing like the smoothness of tones and level of detail you get with an 8x10 negative, but some of my recent digital work rivals that quality, especially when I stitch 3 or 4 images together to make one huge file.” His 17-foot long multi-exposure mural of Plantation Oak at the Jekyll Convention Center is printed from a 100,000,000 pixel file. “You can see every little squiggle on the Spanish moss,” he observed.
Technique, however, is just a means to an end, according to Hambright. “I used to tell students that I would rather see a poorly executed new idea than a perfectly in-focus, correctly exposed photograph of just another, thoughtless beach scene.”
The accompanying images are representative of what you can see at Hambright’s exhibit at Art Downtown’s SoGlo Gallery from mid-January until the first of March. Look for more interesting, thought provoking exhibits to be mounted throughout the year.
