Born and raised in Anson, Texas, a ranch town west of Fort
Worth, Forman Hanna grew up gazing at big skies over seemingly infinite
expanses of flat earth. He began reading camera club magazines while studying to
become a pharmacist in Galveston in the early 1900s; after graduating, he landed
a job in Globe, Arizona, where he was to spend most of his adult life. Hanna
had great success as an amateur art photographer, winning numerous medals and
awards and even having a solo exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum in 1948.

Like many amateur photographers, Hanna was more
interested in traditional sources of beauty than in the everyday forms explored
by his modernist contemporaries like Edward Weston. Fascinated with the
American Southwest—its fast-disappearing Native American cultures, mythical
cowboys, and breathtaking landscape—Hanna sought to preserve the region’s unique
character. In this image, one of several cloud studies, a low horizon line emphasizes
the rhapsodic cloud formations of a desert sunset.