Philip Hyde (photographer)

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Philip Hyde (1921-2006) was a pioneer landscape photographer and conservationist. He attended Ansel Adams' photography program at the California School of Fine Arts in the fall of 1947, studying under photographers like Edward Weston, Imogen Cunningham and Dorothea Lange.

Hyde became a contributing photographer for the Sierra Club Annual in 1951. By 1955, when he contributed This is Dinosaur, about the Dinosaur National Monument in Utah, he had become the primary conservation photographer for the Club. David Brower commissioned him for what came to be known as "battle books,"--with which the Sierra Club waged various environmental campaigns.

In the 1960s, the US Bureau of Reclamation was considering damming the Grand Canyon. The Sierra Club financed a book called Time and the River Flowing: Grand Canyon in 1964 in an effort to turn public opinion against such a project. Philip Hyde was the photographer they chose. This book reshaped the image of the Grand Canyon for Americans and played a major role in preserving the Canyon.

Hyde said, "For every place there will always be people that want to exploit it, and there will always be people—hopefully—that want to save it and keep it as it is. Even with the risk of inviting the crowds into paradise, better to publish your photographs and rally the troops. What’s in the frame of the photograph matters artistically, to be sure, but what’s outside the frame can destroy it."

[edit] Books Published

Hyde produced 15 books, most of them for the Sierra Club, and contributed to 70 others. His last book, The Range of Light, published in 1992, included passages by John Muir, the naturalist and founder of the Sierra Club.

His books include:

1992: The Range of Light - ISBN 0-87905-480-8
1990: Drylands: The Deserts of North America - ISBN 0-517-03289-9
1979: A Glen Canyon portfolio - ISBN 0-87358-187-3
1971: Slickrock: The Canyon Country of Southeast Utah - ISBN 0-87156-051-8
1967: Navajo Wildlands: As Long as the Rivers Shall Run - Photographs by Philip Hyde; Text by Stephen C. Jett, with selections from Willa Cather and others. Edited by Kenneth Brower with a foreword by David Brower.
1963: The Last Redwoods - Philip Hyde and François Leydet; Foreword by Stewart L. Udall.