When you look at Cricket Hackmann’s photographs of familiar rural landscapes and structures, they are luminous with the sort of glow one usually finds in projected slides, rather than 2-D prints. In fact, people often look at her work and comment on the richness of the color.
“I admire black-and-white photography, but I do very little of it myself because I’m so drawn to color,” she said. “It’s like when you were a kid and your mom splurged and got you the big box of crayons. … I enjoy the intensity and vividness of the colors in the world around us.”
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The Ashland-based artist, who will be exhibiting at her first Art in the Park this weekend, possesses an aesthetic centered on bringing that feeling to all of her work. Hackmann works mainly in digital photography and incorporates a two-step process to make her images. The first half, she said, involves composing the shot.
“I try to get out when the light is just right,” she said. “I prefer using natural light — I don’t do much when it comes to adding light — so I get out in the early morning or evening when the light is most favorable.”
The second step consists of refining her images using technology “to help re-create the way things felt at the time,” she said.
“The camera sees with one eye, and we see with two — we see with more depth and dimension than it’s possible for the camera to capture, so I do what I can, using various editing software, to try and add that dimension back so that it has the same feeling I had when I was there.”
Sometimes she is so enchanted by the color she intensifies them more than the reality of the original moment. “I’m not a photojournalist,” Hackmann pointed out. She’s not trying to accurately portray a scene; she’s more like an impressionist painter using photography as her brush and paint.
The use of photography as an artistic medium wasn’t always the norm for Hackmann. Years ago, the artist’s mother “upgraded her 35 mm camera and gave me her old one. That was the first nice camera that I had. Within a year or so of that time, my oldest child was born. I took tons of photos and just really enjoyed documenting the days as they went by, and making the photo albums.
“Gradually, as my kids got older and went into teenage years and became less interested in having the camera pointed at them, … I started looking for other places to point the camera,” she added, “and that’s when I got more into photography as art.”
That was around the time of the digital revolution in photography, and Hackmann embraced the freedom of being able to take hundreds of pictures to get exactly the one she wanted without fearing the expense of developing film and making prints. She learned her craft largely through experimentation — through trial and error, picking up the occasional book or viewing an online tutorial when she was stuck.
A further catalyst for her artistic development came when a friend sent a link to a “Project 365” website, a forum for photographers who commit to making one image per day for a year.
“I thought to myself, ‘One picture a day? That doesn’t sound very hard.’ It turned out to be a lot more of a challenge than I realized. It’s just one picture, but it’s got to be one picture that you think is good enough to share with the world, every single day,” she said.
“I didn’t get my year done in a year; it took me about 15 months,” she added. “… But I stuck with it, and the whole process of looking for something every day sharpened my eye. It made a big difference in the way that I see the world. It’s like I spent that year looking at the world through a viewfinder. After I got my 365 pictures done, I was ready to move on from that, but I have kept that focus. I think that was really my transition year.”
The connections Hackmann made through this project have been kept alive; it’s given her access to people from all over the country who critique and support one another’s work.
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