Edward Hahn

Virginia-based Korean-American artist Edward Hahn, an MIT-trained engineer, recently decided to concentrate full-time on his passion, photography. The refocusing of energies portrayed in his recent works picture processes of travel, transformation and evolution. Deploying both analog and digital expertise, Hahn crafts hauntingly mysterious and pensive images in a cool, minimalist mode that draws us into familiar settings captured with otherworldly calm.

Often black and white or nearly monochrome, each meticulously composed frame drips with atmosphere, whether in the form of creeping mist, rippling waves or glistening soil. Hahn’s meditative vistas are uncannily invigorating.

My artistic vision is of the contemplative, and concentrates on capturing a meditative emotion that is present in the everyday. I prefer to capture the image in the camera, using techniques such as long exposure or tilt-shift lenses. The processing approach is to eschew outright digital manipulation, and instead to focus on techniques equivalent to what a film photographer might perform in a darkroom: adjusting contrast, enhancing / deemphasizing color, and adjusting highlight and shadow areas. For black-and- white images from a digital source, I tweak the image to mimic the tonal balance and contrast achieved by different black- and-white films, filters, and photographic paper and processing techniques such as toning.