Hannah Price is an African Mexican American photographer and filmmaker born in 1986 in Annapolis, Maryland, and raised in Fort Collins, Colorado. She earned a BFA in photography with a minor in applied imaging systems in 2009 from the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York and an MFA in photography in 2014 from the Yale School of Art. She developed an interest in photography at age six or seven when her father gave her a camera. She has worked as an exhibitions assistant at the Yale University Art Gallery, as well as an instructor at the Community College of Philadelphia, where she is currently an instructional aid.[1] She is “primarily interested in documenting relationships, race politics, social perception and misperception.”[2] Her documentary films have less of a planned structure and are more improvised than her photographs.[3]
Price’s City of Brotherly Love series (2009–12) examines the artist’s personal experiences with street harassment and catcallers after her relocation to Philadelphia in 2009. Photography allowed her to engage with the behavior from a more objective stance. She spoke with the men as she photographed them to arrive at a better understanding of each other’s lives. By turning the camera on the catcallers, Price reversed the narrative and placed her subjects in a state of vulnerability, but she also thereby provided a response, which the men desired.[4] She explained, “I was sharing my experience as a female and reclaiming the power of the male gaze without reprimanding the men.”[5] The series juxtaposes the portraits of catcallers with photographs of people seen in images around the city—in advertisements, murals, signs— to demonstrate the difference between how she was approached and how she would like to be approached.[6]
Price’s Cursed by Night series (2012–13) addresses the racist belief that Black men are inherently dangerous. The artist photographed sitters at night without any additional light source, using the resulting obscurity as a tool to interrogate perception.[7] Her Resemblance series (2007–9) includes portraits of inner-city high schoolers in Rochester, New York, and looks at the relationships between environment, stereotypes, and future possibilities. The series Semaphore (2018) explores the myriad ways individuals signal their identities and focuses less on race and more on identification practices in general. The use of bright white in these photographs references the definition and idea of semaphore as visual signaling, and the black-and-white aesthetic in Semaphore and Cursed by Night reflects the dichotomy between the perception of white or light as positive and black or dark as dangerous.[8]
PMA Collection
References
Chow, Kat. 2013. “A Photographer Turns Her Lens on Men Who Catcall.” National Public Radio, October 17, 2013. https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/10/17/235413025/a-photographer-turns-her-lens-on-men-who-cat-call.
Mba, Gazelle. 2020. “Hannah Price on Identity, Projections and Distortions.” Magnum Photos, October 9, 2020. https://www.magnumphotos.com/theory-and-practice/hannah-price-on-identity-projections-and-distortions/.
Price, Hannah. n.d. Artist’s website. Accessed December 15, 2020. www.hannahcprice.com.
Rodríguez, Sid. n.d. “Q&A with Photographer Hannah Price.” Philadelphia Museum of Art (website). Accessed December 15, 2020. https://www.philamuseum.org/exhibitions/858.html?page=2.
Endnotes
[1] Chow 2013; Mba 2020; Price n.d.; Rodríguez n.d.
[2] Price n.d.
[3] Mba 2020; Rodríguez n.d.
[4] Chow 2013; Rodríguez n.d.
[5] Quoted in Rodríguez n.d.
[6] Chow 2013.
[7] Rodríguez n.d.
[8] Mba 2020.
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