Ilka Hartmann: Photographer
Walks of Life • transcript of radio show by Jonah Raskin, Summer 2003
Ask Ilka Hartmann about the epic journeys she has undertaken as a photographer, and she'll probably talk about the time she traveled to the remote Santa Maria Mountains in Mexico - along with her 3 -year-old son Ole. Together, Ilka and Ole traveled by foot and on mule and horseback. They traveled for days and each day took them further away from civilization. "It felt like we were on the roof of the world," Hartmann says. "It seemed like the end of the world." They crossed hot deserts and raging rivers that threatened to carry them away, and all Hartmann's pictures too - thousands of photos that captured the lives of the Huichol Indians. That's the way it's been with Hartmann for more than 30 years. She's risked everything to take photographs.
Hartmann was born in Hamburg, Germany in 1942. Her father, who was a doctor, disappeared during the war - and Ilka was raised by her mother, like so many other Germans of her generation. Frau Hartmann gave her daughter her first camera when she was 16 years old - just a plain box camera, but Ilka took photos with it that were so stunning that she won prizes. From then on there was no stopping her. She learned literally how to see in the dark and to be aware of textures, and how to bring out textures on film.
In the mid-1960s, Hartmann settled in America, with her mother. She took photography classes at the junior college in Stockton. Then, in the late 1960s, she did a photographic essay about the Black Panthers, especially the Oakland, California Black Panthers and their leaders Huey Newton and Bobby Seale. Next, she documented the Indian take-over of Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay, probably her most famous photos. Hartmann has documented protest movements ever since then, including the protest movement to stop the War in Vietnam, and the war against Iraq. But she photographs something much larger than protest movements.
"I use images to tell the story of the human condition and to express the soul of the people," Hartmann says. "I use pictures to reveal the underlying dignity and the pride of human beings, especially those people in our society who think of themselves as ugly or unwanted."
These days she spends much of her time in her darkroom. Still, she'd like to get outside again and take pictures of the homeless people living on our streets and sidewalks, under bridges and along our creeks. "There are certain things, certain gestures, I feel I have to capture," she says. "If I don't photograph them I actually feel sick. I can't really explain it in words. And that's why I take pictures."
For Walks of Life this is Jonah Raskin