Douglas Hamm
Three Decades of Creative Photography
Meet professional photographer Douglas Hamm of Spiritual Images.
Douglas Hamm is a creative photographer living in Prescott AZ, who worked commercially for decades. Today, many of his photographs are taken in the Southwest, depicting the rugged beauty and inspiring landscapes. He uses his photography and vision skills to capture raw, thought provoking and creative beauty in nature.
Raised in the Midwest and trained as a aerial photographer for the Navy, his eye for detail is amazing. He feels God has given him a talent for photography and an uncanny ability to capture ‘spiritual images’. He’ll spend hours at a site looking and waiting; his trained eye always searching for the right light and angle.
There’s a feeling you get when you hit that shutter. You feel it. It’s unbelievable.
History and Study with Ansel Adams
In the early 1960’s Douglas was a aerial photographer for the U.S. navy. This was followed by advertising and commercial work, as well as periods of study and apprenticeship under the legendary likes of Ansel Adams, Wynn Bullock, Al Weber, Arnold Newman, Dora Bothwell and Ralph Putzker.
He met and came to know Ansel Adams, photographer of the West, and was chosen as Adams’ assistant at a workshop he held in Yosemite Park in 1975. Describing that workshop as “intense,” Hamm has mastered not only the technical and mechanical aspects of photography but the artistic qualities as well. The influence he had from early mentors and icons has helped transform Hamm into something of an icon himself.
Douglas has been named on of the top 30 photographers in the nation by the highly respected fine art website, www.guild.com, which backs up it assessment by selling Hamm’s work online and through published catalogs.
Where Doug’s Works are Shown
Other samples of Hamms photography are on permanent display at the Burpee Art Museum in Rockford, ILL and in Word Picture Productions collection in New Orleans’s, La. He is also represented in dozens of prestigious art galleries which span the country form Santa Barbara, CA to Portland, Maine.
Douglas Hamm
“I know if I were dying of cancer in some hospital bed and I saw the ‘Mighty hand (one of his images), I’d be instantly at peace”.
-Douglas Hamm
“Doug’s art is thought provoking and captures the essence of the beauty and Majesty created by the Almighty. I have observed the people that have been in our facility, look deeply into the photographic art, as if reflecting on their own Spirituality”.
-Dan Davis
“I had the great fortune to gaze in amazement at his “Blue Sky Portfolio”, an aerial photographic series of water and the arresting powers of pollution. I was also able to view two images from his Spiritual Images “Portraits in Nature” which I can only describe as, well…the mother lode of photographic creativity. By viewing Hamms’ images one sees that he has the utmost respect for the earth and the astonishing, sometime haunting, forces of nature.
-Karen Trask, Discovering Treasure
Ansel Adams at work in Yosemite, California. Photography by Douglas Hamm 1975
Side Note:
Douglas Dean Hamm, 77, of Prescott, Arizona, passed away peacefully at his home on Tuesday, March 15, 2016.
