on a high note
Hannele Lahti Exposing Nature By Cindy Brookshire
N
ationally recognized documentary and fine art photographer Hannele Lahti remembers the first time she picked up a camera. She was 5. It was a pink Minnie Mouse 110. Later, while she was in junior high, her father bought her a Petri 35mm from a pawn shop. “It was just a single lens SLR,” she recalled.
Everything about nature Hannele Lahti fascinated her, from the rippling waters of Lake Wesserunsett in central Maine, where she grew up, to the long drives out to Wyoming to visit the ranch where her grandmother worked. “My parents were both teachers, so we had the summers off to go on road trips,” she explained. Wild horses often became the subject of her focus. She also seeks water, inspired by the first art show she attended as a child: a showcase of several oil paintings by French Impressionist Claude Monet, including “Water Lilies.”
Maine, as well as in Rochester, New York. Her work as a photographer, which focuses primarily on images of nature, has earned her at least a half-dozen awards. She was a winner in 2013 (Issue 32) in the professional photography category competition of New York-based Creative Quarterly: the Journal of Art & Design, among the top publications of its kind in the world. She also won runner-up in that competition, with a second image she submitted, and she won runner-up again in the magazine’s 33rd edition competition. (That publication listing winners hit stands the end of April.) Additionally, Lahti won a 2005 FOLIO Ozzie Gold Award, recognizing excellence in magazine design (and photography) in New York. At only 33, she is a member and past co-president of the D.C. chapter of the American Society of Media Photographers. She has served on the advisory board and awards committee for FotoWeek DC, rebranded in 2011 to FotoDC, Inc., a nonprofit organization in the nation’s capital committed to providing exposure for photographers and with an annual photo festival that draws more than 40,000 attendees each year.
Lahti brought her water images of her beloved Lake Wesserunsett to her recent “Ebb & Flow” exhibit at the Hylton Performing Arts Center, in Manassas. It’s her second exhibit in Prince William. Last year she participated in a group exhibit at the Center for the Arts at the Candy Factory, in downtown Manassas. She will teach a four-hour workshop there on July 12.
“People think they have to have the right camera. They don’t. It’s more about who’s behind the camera, and what that person has to say,” Lahti said. “You don’t look at a painting and wonder, ‘What brush did the artist use?’ You don’t read a story and ask, ‘What kind of pen did the writer hold?’ Photography is still a new art form in so many ways. It’s only a couple hundred years old and has a long ways to go.”
Lahti, who has exhibited her works as a professional member of Women Photojournalists of Washington, D.C., has participated in 20 shows and exhibits in the past 12 years in Washington and
Lahti, who is a 2003 graduate of the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York (with a bachelor’s degree in photography), has paid her dues. She once posed kitschy kids-
10 | June 2014 prince william living