Background
Ilka Maria Hartmann was born on January 23, 1942 in Hamburg, Germany.
Ilka Maria Hartmann was born on January 23, 1942 in Hamburg, Germany.
Ilka Maria Hartmann received an Abitur degree in 1963 from the German Gymnasium. She studied theology at universities in Berlin and Hamburg (1963-1964) and emigrated to the United States in 1964, where she studied photography with Edward E. Schwyn and received a Bachelor of Arts in Religion from University of the Pacific, Stockton, California, in 1966. Hartmann earned a Master of Arts in German Language and Literature from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1969.
Ilka Maria Hartmann was a photography instructor at New College of San Francisco. She held the same position at Faultline Institute, Bolinas, California, in 1975-1978, and was a teaching assistant in German at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1968-1969. She co-founded Jeroboam, a San Francisco photographers' cooperative, in 1972.
Since 1971 Ilka Maria Hartmann has photographed American Indians in the San Francisco Bay Area, the Southwest and the Northwest, and the Huicholes in Mexico. She has also documented the events in a small California town since 1969 and has photographed harbor seals (1978), the Chinese community in Oakland, California (1972), Black Panthers in the San Francisco Bay Area (1967-1970) and the San Francisco Bay oil spill of 1971.