Philip Hyde (photographer)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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 Minor White, Imogen Cunningham and Dorothea Lange.

Hyde became a contributing photographer for the Sierra Club Annual in 1951. By 1955, when he photographed for This is Dinosaur, a book highlighting a proposed dam on the Green River in Dinosaur National Monument in Utah and Colorado, he had become the primary conservation photographer for the Club. David Brower commissioned him to photograph 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 Colorado River in Grand Canyon. The Sierra Club published a book called Time and the River Flowing: Grand Canyon in 1964 in an effort to turn public opinion against this project that threatened the integrity of the wild river and its canyon. 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.

Hyde realized that spending time in the desert turned him from a black-and-white photographer to a color photographer. He is well-known for collaborating with author Edward Abbey on a desert classic, "Slickrock," (1971) yet another Sierra Club book published to highlight the threats to wilderness, in this case, the Utah redrock country of Canyonlands National Park, Capitol Reef National Park, and the Escalante River wilderness.

[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 last interview was featured in "Lasting Light: 125 Years of Grand Canyon Photography" by Stephen Trimble

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.