Q.T. Luong has shared an insightful and well-written tribute to photographer Philip Hyde: Philip Hyde Books.
Philip Hyde has been described as one of the most important members of the mid-to-late twentieth-century generation of American landscape photographers – in Luong’s article he is described as being a member of a trinity that includes Ansel Adams and Eliot Porter. Of the three, Hyde is the least known – perhaps not so much because his work wasn’t seen but, rather, because it was often seen in the service of other things, mostly environmental causes. His son, David Leland Hyde, who carries on his father’s legacy, has said that his father may have regarded the value his photographs had in the campaign to keep two dams out of Grand Canyon National Park to be his greatest success – not a bad legacy, I’d say!
Hyde’s work was featured in the early Sierra Club “coffee table books” on environmental and wilderness subjects. Today, even as role of actual books fades and online imagery (in some ways, unfortunately) increases, we still take these sorts of books for granted, and we perhaps forget just how important they were. How many of use had our first profound experience with the power of photographs through these books? I know that I and many others who began doing photography during the latter half of the 1900s certainly did. In his article, Luong acknowledges that he formed much of is own orientation to photography before he knew about Hyde, but he also acknowledges an affinity he feels for Hyde’s work. This is no accident. The influence of Hyde’s way of seeing the natural world has, I am certain, affected many photographers (and others) who are unaware of the source of this influence – precisely because the effect of his work and of the books through which it was shared was so widespread and pervasive.
I know that I saw Hyde’s work when I was much younger. I worked in a book store for some years and managed to purchase just about any Sierra Club book that we had on the shelves. But I’m afraid that I didn’t connect what I saw to Hyde himself at that time, though the power of the photographs certainly affected me. When I first photographed in the Sierra and elsewhere in California, it was these images (along with those of Adams and Porter and Weston and others) that I held in mind as a model of what I wanted my photographs to do.
A few years ago I stopped at the Mono Lake visitor center and wandered into a side room where there is a small (and, unfortunately, somewhat neglected) gallery of photographs. Among the images in this gallery are several of Hyde’s photographs. As I looked at them, I “saw” them for the first time and recognized a source of the way of seeing that is pervasive in the work of so many who photograph the natural world. (Needless to say, I now visit that little gallery almost every time I’m near Mono Lake.)
