Drake Hokanson

Photographer and author Drake Hokanson looks to the broad American land, its places, people and stories as the most important subjects for his photographs, books, exhibits and essays.

His black and white photographs are of ordinary things and places conditioned by human use, things made powerful by the inquiry of the camera. His subjects range coast to coast and include highways, small towns, landscapes, grain elevators, the Mississippi River, and the people who call American places home.

Hokanson works in 120 roll format using either Hasselblad cameras and lenses or a Fuji panorama camera, tripod mounted whenever possible. After a few weeks on the road shooting, he often arrives back home with as many as 150 rolls of film to process. Hokanson relies on Ansel Adams' Zone System of negative exposure and development. He prints exclusively on fine exhibition quality paper which is selenium toned, processed to archival standards and matted using 100% acid-free rag mat.

Drake Hokanson exhibited his first photograph in 1970: a small sepia-toned Iowa landscape that hung in a group show at the East Street Gallery in Grinnell, Iowa. Since then Hokanson has expanded his range to photograph the likes of Times Square, the cotton fields of West Texas, Donner Pass in California, and thunderstorms in eastern Montana. He has exhibited from Connecticut to California, with a score of one-man shows in art museums, historical and cultural museums and private galleries.

He has earned grants from the Wisconsin Arts Board and the Iowa Arts Council, and has participated in several recent group exhibitions including the "Wisconsin Triennial" at the Madison Arts Center and "Beyond the Perimeter" at the Minnesota Center for Photography. In 1997 he was selected as a photographer for the Wisconsin Sesquicentennial Rephotographic Project, which culminated in the publication of Wisconsin Then and Now. In addition, Hokanson has conducted workshops and given lectures at many universities, museums, conferences, and galleries.

Hokanson is currently assistant professor in mass communication at Winona State University, Winona, Minnesota, where he teaches photography and journalism courses. He has taught at the University of Iowa; City University (London); Lakeland College; Lakeland College Japan (Tokyo); and University of Wisconsin-La Crosse.