Self-taught photographer Paul Hamann has been making black and white images since 1968, exploring through various camera formats and printing techniques, the aspects of the natural landscape.

Inspired by the work of the great landscape photographers and armed with a keen interest in the natural mathematics of order/chaos, Hamann’s  photographs seek to reveal the patterns and sequences in the exterior natural landscape in a way that transcends the subject matter and draws us into a space that surrounds the subject of the image.

Working first with a 35mm camera, Hamann began taking pictures with an eye to the details and abstractions that captured the essence of what he saw. He soon began to explore the greater range and depth of large format negatives—first working with a 5×7 camera and later experimenting with 4×5 and even larger formats. The technical requirements of shooting with the larger format cameras as well as the resulting clarity and definition of the images proved perfectly suited to the detail and precision of Hamann’s creative vision.

Susan Sontag said, “The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.” This distinction is certainly true of landscape photography. Although Paul Hamann’s photographs are essentially disclosing their subject they are also in effect constructed by the almost mathematical imagination with which they are composed, exposed and printed. The images themselves also construct a sort of meta landscape, stringing the tension between what is perceived on the surface of the image and what might be hidden behind, around, beneath or within it—the landscape of the interior.

This tension between what is constructed and what is disclosed is at the core of what Paul Hamann’s images are about—revealing the ordered patterns in the chaos, the motion in the perceived stillness, the interior of the exterior.