Making prints, La Crosse, Wisconsin

I am equal parts photographer and nonfiction writer, and I find greatest reward in the application of both arts to the task of illuminating some idea, some place, some story, some part of American life.

For me, photography is best employed in the study of something, a fragment of the glorious, palpable, sensory world. Unlike any other art--opera, painting, fiction, etc.--photography has the power to reveal distant things and events in a concrete, specific way. When my work is at its best, there is no need for suspension of disbelief; every tiny thing within the image is clear, unmanipulated, in focus, specific, and invites the close attention of the viewer. Opera distills emotion to its purest form; painting makes visible that which cannot otherwise be seen; fiction plumbs the breadth of human existence; and photography, for me, makes the world real.

Because of my writer's sensibilities, I find it important to know a great deal about the subjects I photograph. For example, I think my images of grain elevators are better because I know how grain elevators are built and how they work. Landscape photographs are better for having some understanding of basic geologic processes. Like any photographer, I respond first visually to any subject; but by bringing to bear some deeper knowledge of a subject means I can probe it more thoroughly and reveal it more intimately, rather than respond only to its evident surface qualities.

Since almost all of my photographs are "found" rather than "planned," there is no substitute for simply being there with the tripod set up when the subject and the light are right, so my methods of travel and photographing are devised to provide greatest access to potential subjects.

Put more simply, I sleep in the truck a lot, or camp. This means I can photograph late into the evening, until the light fails altogether, then make a meal by lantern light over the camp stove, sleep where I am, wake with the morning light, and begin shooting again as soon as my eyes are open enough to focus. A look at my contact sheets reveals a number of subjects photographed in light from opposite directions: first in the low slanting light of evening and then in the low slanting light of the next morning.

Fourth grade photographers from Marshfield, Wisconsin, slow down long enough to have their portrait taken. These energetic photographers were the core of Hokanson's photo workshop called "Photographing Your Town," sponsored in conjunction with the exhibit of "Photographs of a Small Place" at the New Visions Gallery, Marshfield, Wisconsin in 1994.

I've not worked alone on these book and exhibit projects. My wife, Carol Kratz, gets a lot of reading done when she accompanies me and is happy to talk to the curious rancher who stops to see what's going on, leaving me to concentrate on getting the shot before the clouds move and the shadows change. Because of our close and ongoing collaboration (she edited my first two books), we've embarked on a couple of book projects together as coauthors. See the Books & Publications page for details.

Geographers, historians, and other peripatetic wanders like myself have filled my maps with good places to check out, and numerous local residents have taken me (or us) to remote sod houses, ghost towns, the back forty, have fed us and put us up for the night.

Some technical stuff:

My equipment and film choices are based on the idea of often spending long weeks in the field immersed in subjects and shooting a lot of film. The black and white photographs on this site were made with either Hasselblad equipment (2 ¼ inch square negatives) using lenses from 50mm to 250mm, or with a Fuji G617 panorama camera (2 ¼ by 7 inch negatives) with its105mm lens. Since I sometimes return home from a three-week shooting trip with a cooler containing as much as 140 rolls of exposed film, the cumbersome nature of sheet film would make these sorts of field trips impractical.

I shoot on Kodak T-Max 100 and 400 film, process it in D:76, and for exposure and development, I use Ansel Adams' version of the Zone System right out of his wonderful book, The Negative.

In my field notes I record film information relevant to development for each roll but don't bother with aperture and shutter speed.

Back in the darkroom, I print on Oriental Seagull VC fiber paper using a great old Bessler enlarger with a colorhead and on a highly modified Zone VI enlarger. My prints are selenium toned and processed to archival standards. And I work in 35mm and in color. Purebred and Home-Grown: America's County Fairs has all been shot on Kodachrome 200 transparency film.