Project Description
Hank Gans has been a commercial photographer since 1975, working for high profile corporate clients such as A.T&T., Ciba Geigy, Kodak, Merrill Lynch, Johnson & Johnson, and Barclay’s and First Union Banks. He has won many New York and Chicago Art Directors Club awards and his work has been featured several times in PHOTOGRAPHIS, the Swiss annual of the “world’s best advertising and editorial photography.”
Encouraged by the great color photographer, Ernst Haas, who had declared Hank’s personal work “perfection”, Hank left Manhattan for a year to photograph the American southwest. He lived with the Hopi Tribe at Keams Canyon, Arizona, becoming a member of the Hopi community by teaching photography at Northland College on the reservation.
Hank chose to live at the base of the Hopi Mesas because they were the center of the Four Corners area which was the focal point of his photography. Perhaps because Hank was not trying to exploit the tribe through photography he gained the tribe’s trust and was asked by many tribal members to photograph them and their relatives. A year’s sabbatical from his commercial work became three years of self-exploration as a photographer of the Southwest.
Hank eventually left the mile-high Hopi mesas to settle on the banks of Penobscot Bay in coastal Maine where he concentrated on fine art photography, publishing the first of his large Maine Coastline Portfolio lithographs and having a one man show at the Union Hall Gallery of the Maine Photographic Workshops.
In 2000 his love for still photography and a new wife led Hank back east where he reestablished himself as a commercial photographer and continues his exploration of the world through his color photography.
