Best Creative Photographer - Portraiture/Fashion & Boudoir
Dawn Hartman Photography
By Jessie Sage
dawnhartmanphotography.com
I was significantly pregnant with my 8-year-old son the first time I met portrait and event photographer Dawn Hartman of Dawn Hartman Photography. Though we met in a social context, she took one look at me and casually said, “We should meet at the park and do a maternity shoot. I have the perfect spot in mind!” Though he was my third child, it hadn’t occurred to me until that moment to do a professional photo shoot to document my pregnant body. I jumped at the chance.
A few weeks later, my partner and I met up with her at Schenley Park. Not knowing what to expect, I came with an open mind and a few outfits. Hartman, however, had her own plans. She pulled a long, flowing, strapless, off-white gown out of her bag and told me to put it on. When we couldn’t get it to fit around my expanding body, she ripped the back of it, assuring me the tear wouldn’t be noticeable in the pictures. At the stone wall where she wanted me to perch, I panicked — I had no idea how I would get up there. In the end, it took two grown men to hoist and stabilize me. “You look like a pregnant goddess,” she said once I was finally positioned. She gently guided me through poses, and we created some of the most beautiful pictures I’ve ever taken, swollen feet and all.
When my son was born, she came to the hospital and took pictures of our new family; when he was old enough to smile, she sneezed in an exaggerated enough way that my baby looked at the camera and laughed. When I was starting to feel like myself again post-partum, she took boudoir photos of me in her beautiful Victorian-style home studio — my nursing breasts spilling out of a corset she pulled from her armoire and tightly laced up my back. In the nine years we have known each other, she has documented my family, my career, and my body through many life transitions.
I am not the only one who has this kind of relationship with Hartman. Last year, I wrote about The Intimacy Project, the LGBTQ artist advocacy project that launched her full-time photography career, but for her, that was only the beginning. “The Intimacy Project is what gave me the notoriety to build my business,” she told me over Zoom. “Because of that project, the queer community started telling people about me, and then they started contacting me to do families, weddings, boudoir, all of it.” It is this versatility that has gotten the attention of Pittsburgh, leading to being voted best portrait and boudoir photographer for 2025. From political art focused on queer representation, to sexy boudoir for all body types, to authentic family documentation, to an astounding number of newborns (more than 3,600 over the course of her 14-year newborn photography career at Pittsburgh hospitals), Hartman has been able to give many people in this community stunning and authentic images of their lives. Anyone lucky enough to see themselves through her lens knows what a delight it is to witness the beauty in themselves that she draws out of everyone she captures.
In addition to her large Troy Hill home that doubles as a gorgeous natural light studio, where she creates much of her art, Dawn Hartman Photography is expanding. She is in the process of creating a 2,500-square-foot commercial space called Revolving Muse — also in Troy Hill — that will be an event space (including the home of her popular event Whispers), an art gallery, and a studio available to artists and photographers within the community.