It was there all along

Handmade Books and Photography
by Frank Hamrick

September 6 – October 29

Frank Hamrick creates handmade books that combine photography, storytelling, papermaking, and letterpress printing to address the themes of time, relationships, and home. Hamrick says of his work:

The artist’s book allows me to mix analog and digital processes to convey my ideas in a time based medium, similar to theatre and music, but it is also a physical piece of work the viewer must hold and interact with to understand. The viewer has an intimate relationship with the book by feeling its textures and turning its pages, instead of viewing an image on the wall across the room.

If a photograph is considered in the same manner as a single song, then an artist’s book is similar to an entire album of music complete with cover art and liner notes. Artist’s books allows for the combination of images with text and the incorporation of materials, like handmade paper, and processes, such as letterpress, staining, and layering various colors of paper to create limited edition works of art that can convey a more complete, realized idea than a single image is capable of doing.

Oxford American Magazine and NPR have written about Frank Hamrick’s art. His work is housed in institutions including The Amon Carter Museum of American Art, The Art Institute of Chicago, The Griffin Museum of Photography, and The Ogden Museum of Southern Art. Hamrick is an associate professor and MFA graduate program coordinator at Louisiana Tech University. His limited edition artist’s 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 Los Angeles Festival of Photography’s Photobook Competition.