Virna Haffer

Virna Haffer was a gifted and innovative photographer who made lasting contributions to photography in the Northwest and nationally. She was a self-taught photographer raised in the utopian community of Home Colony, Washington who began exhibiting her work professionally in the 1920s both independently and as a member of the Seattle Camera Club. She went on to show her work extensively in American and European photographic salons and museum exhibitions earning an international reputation. Her body of work includes pictorialist and surrealist images from the 1920s and 1930s, documentary and straight photography from the 1930s and 1940s, and experimental work with photograms and other non-film photographic processes starting in the 1950s. Her book Making Photograms: The Creative Process of Painting with Light, published in 1969, still serves as a reference manual for contemporary artists interested in this process.