Frank Hamrick
Oxford American Magazine and NPR have written about Frank Hamrick’s art. His work is collected by the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, The Art Institute of Chicago and The Ogden Museum of Southern Art. Frank is an associate professor and the graduate program coordinator at Louisiana Tech University.
Born in Georgia, Frank grew up surrounded by the writing of Flannery O’Connor, Joel Chandler Harris and Alice Walker as well as the music of Little Richard, Otis Redding, and The Allman Brothers Band. Frank’s artists’ books combine photography and storytelling with papermaking and letterpress printing to address time, relationships and home. Frank’s limited edition artists’ book of tintype images Harder than writing a good haiku earned the 2017 Houston Center for Photography Fellowship and was awarded first place in the 2017 Photobook Independent competition at The Los Angeles Festival of Photography.
Jesus Learned The Hard Way
This is an in-progress series I am working towards completion later this summer when it will be published as a limited edition artists’ book to be exhibited and available for purchase during Atlanta Celebrates Photography this coming October.
My first tintype artists’ book project “Sometimes Rivers Flow Backwards” focused heavily on still life subject matter in my house. “Harder than writing a good haiku” followed with tintype images of environmental portraits creating open-ended stories.
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This current series begins with a man looking out a window. From there the images move through the outside world. The title, “Jesus learned the hard way”, is based on one of my first students. He had tan skin, black hair and pronounced his name as if calling out to a Greek god, “Hey, Zeus!” Jesus did not show up to class one Friday morning. Towards the end of the semester, I received an e-mail from Jesus explaining he had been walking home after a drunken night on the town when he decided he could go no further and stopped at a gas station. He used the pay phone to tell the police an explosive device had been found. The bomb squad was not happy when they arrived to find a young man in the parking lot who just wanted a ride home. Now Jesus was writing to ask me if he had missed too many classes to pass the course.
To view more of Frank’s work please visit his website.
