Virna Haffer home movies, approximately 1925-1940

Virna May Hansen was born in 1899 and raised in the anarchist-utopian community of Home, Washington. When she was ten a cameraman visiting the colony awakened her interest in photography and by age 15 she left school to apprentice with a commerical photographer in Tacoma. She married socialist and labor advocate, Paul Raymond Haffer. She started her career as a commercial portrait photographer in the early 1920s (where she photographed the Weyerhaeuser and Chihuly families). She also became a member of the Seattle Camera Club and exhibited her Pictorial photography around the world. By 1930, she was cited in the American Annual of Photography as "one of the most recognized pictorial photographers in America." While she concentrated on photography she also was a printmaker, painter, musician, sculptor, and published writer. She died in 1974.