Overview

One of the most innovative Northwest artists of her time, Virna Haffer was an internationally recognized and respected Tacoma photographer who has slipped from both regional and national art history books. In a career spanning more than six decades, Haffer found success as a photographer, printmaker, painter, musician, sculptor, and published writer, though she is primarily known as a photographer. Self-taught, she began her ambitious career in the early 1920s, both running a successful portrait studio and also exhibiting her unique artistic images around the world. Margaret E. Bullock, curator of collections and special exhibitions at Tacoma Art Museum, art historian Christina S. Henderson, and independent curator and gallery owner David F. Martin examined more than 30,000 of Virna Haffer's photographic negatives, prints, and woodblocks at the Washington State Historical Society and Tacoma Public Library's Special Collections were examined to create this book.

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9780924335327

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Reviews

A Turbulent Lens is an appropriate title for this innovative artist who practices Pictorialism, modernism, Surrealism, documentary photography and studio portraiture with equal ease . . . This book is the first study of her extraordinary photographic output and her life. . . -Susan Platt, Cassone , April 2012

""A Turbulent Lens is an appropriate title for this innovative artist who practices Pictorialism, modernism, Surrealism, documentary photography and studio portraiture with equal ease . . . This book is the first study of her extraordinary photographic output and her life. . ."" -- Susan Platt * Cassone * ""Haffer's was an inimitable life, and this book restores to us a neglected Northwest artist."" -- Mike Dillon * City Living * ""Here's an artist who experimented so vibrantly, on so many fronts, so prolifically, and over such a long period of time, that there's little point in trying to characterize her."" -- Michael Upchurch * The Seattle Times *

Author Information

David F. Martin is an independent arts researcher, writer, curator and historian who has documented the art history of Seattle and the Pacific Northwest since 1986 as well as Western New York State since 1981. He is the leading authority on early Washington State art and artist’s. Many of the artists he has chosen to focus on are women, Japanese and Chinese Americans, Gay & Lesbian and other minorities who had established national and international reputations during the period 1890-1960.

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