Brooke Hammerle
Brooke Hammerle approaches photography as a lifelong search, discovery, and exploration of the mysterious light that animates the world around her.
Hammerle studied painting, drawing, sculpture, and printmaking at American University, the Art Students League in New York, the University of Hawaii, and Rhode Island School of Design, completing her BFA in 1978. Hammerle’s artistic vision is deeply shaped by her early training as a painter. The camera became her way of entering the illuminated world—where light, in all its mercurial and poetic forms, reveals the hidden structures of space, time, and perception. Her work reimagines photography through a painter’s sensitivity to color, rhythm, and abstraction.
Across decades of experimentation—from film to digital, from darkroom processes to contemporary materials—Hammerle has remained devoted to exploring the transience of light. Water, reflections, movement, and shifting atmospheres become portals into worlds where nature and abstraction merge. Her photographs often dissolve traditional depth and focus, inviting viewers into spaces where light behaves like energy, gesture, or memory.
Throughout her career, Hammerle has embraced a wide range of materials—paper, aluminum, Plexiglas, and illuminated transparencies—always returning to one central pursuit: the poetry of light and its power to reshape how we see.
Brooke Hammerle lives and works in Providence, Rhode Island.
Interview:
“My vision in photography came through a background in painting. The camera opened the door to the space of the visual world illuminated by that mysterious, mercurial, and magical "Light". My work belongs to photography in that the image is a moment in time created by light captured through a lens.”
