Erich Hartmann was 16-years-old when he went with his family in 1938 to Albany, New York, as a refugee from Nazi Germany.
The only English speaker in the family, he worked in a textile mill, attending evening high school and later taking night courses at Siena College. At the end of the war, he moved to New York City, where he worked as an assistant to a portrait photographer and then as a freelancer.
Throughout his career, he pursued many long-term personal projects, and photographic interpretations with literary echoes. In his later years, he photographed the remains of the Nazi concentration camps, resulting in a book and exhibition, In the Camps. At the time of his death, he was engaged in a photo project, he called Music Everywhere.
