After graduating from high school, Hattersley spent a year studying art at the University of Washington, then left to attend Montana State College in 1941.
[2] In 1949, he was offered a full-time faculty position there, which he accepted and taught alongside Minor White, Charles Arnold, Beaumont Newhall and Robert Koch.
"[8][9] White, in his Aperture editorial in 1964 praised his approach; On sober thought one might say that we are witnessing a resurgence of meaningful photocriticism.
It became the subject of a notorious freedom-of-speech trial with Ginzburg eventually being imprisoned in 1972 for 'distributing obscene material'; Hattersley's nude photographs are widely credited as being the trigger for the court case.
[15] He served as a contributing editor to Popular Photography starting in 1957, in which he wrote the column 'The Hattersley Class For Beginners'.
Among them were; Another student, Carl Chiarenza, hoped that attending the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) would lead to ‘a decent job at Kodak’.
[27] In his third year there, the Bachelor of Fine Arts degree program in photography was offered, developed by White and Hattersley.