Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature’s peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves.  –John Muir

McClure Meadow, Evolution Valley, Kings Canyon National Park, Sierra Nevada, California, copyright 1970 by Philip Hyde. Deardorff 5X7 Large Format Camera. Widely exhibited and published including in "The Range of Light" with quotes by John Muir. Still available as an original vintage darkroom black and white print. Three 8X10 vintage prints left available for sale at this time. Other original vintage black and white prints in the "Yosemite, Kings Canyon and Sierra Portfolio" also available in limited quantities. Please inquire for details.

(See the photograph larger: “McClure Meadow, Evolution Valley, Kings Canyon.”)

In his preface to The Range of Light, with Selections from the Writings of John Muir, my father pioneer landscape photographer Philip Hyde wrote about choosing photographs and John Muir quotes for his book. To read more about The Range of Light see the blog post, “Philip Hyde’s Tribute To John Muir.” Philip Hyde described his process in the Preface to The Range of Light:

It was a labor of love rereading John Muir some fifty years after my first reading. In searching for quotations to use with my photographs, I found the same inspiration and delight I recall feeling in the past—more, really, since my love for the mountains has only increased with the familiarity experience has given me… I wanted to go out again, to go in further, to explore all the places I had missed, and I wanted to improve on the pictures I had made to illustrate the heightened savor I was finding in his words. In nearly a lifetime of returning again and again, I began to feel I had barely scratched the surface. But over the life of the project, my view began to shift from unfulfilled desire to gratitude. I was coming to see that I would never satisfy my thirst for wildness and mountains. I could never make all the definitive photographs of them. But hadn’t I already had more than most men’s share of them? In general, the matching of quotations with pictures should be understood as equivalents—some descriptive, some expressing an experience of feeling that seems to parallel in some way one which John Muir describes. Others are visual equivalents of the words in less direct, more personal ways. There was a basic purpose in all this: my hope to somehow discharge a little of my debt to John Muir for his keen observation that informed and sharpened my own; for his words that amplified my feeling and experience, and colored them both brighter; for his boundless enthusiasm for Nature; for his clear vision that it would not be enough, living in an exploitive culture just to love Nature, but essential for Nature’s continued existence unimpaired, that one work to carry those “good tidings” to others who would, in their turn, work to protect Nature.

In 1938, just before he turned 17, Philip Hyde first visited Yosemite National Park and the Sierra Nevada. On that trip he made his first photographs with a Kodak Readyset 120 camera that he borrowed from his sister. He brought the camera along thinking he would photograph his Boy Scout friends, but when he had the film developed, he discovered that most of the photographs were of nature rather than people, a tendency that stayed with him throughout his career. For more on Philip Hyde’s early trips to Yosemite National Park, see the blog post, “Lake Tenaya And Yosemite National Park.” His wilderness photographs participated in more environmental campaigns than any other photographer of his time and helped to establish the genre of landscape photography as a recognized art form while his photographs served as the backbone of the groundbreaking Sierra Club Books Exhibit Format Series. The Exhibit Format Series, invented by Ansel Adams, David Brower and Nancy Newhall, became known for popularizing the coffee table photography book and helping to establish many national parks and wilderness areas of the Western U. S. Beginning with participation in the first book in the Sierra Club Books Exhibit Format Series, This Is The American Earth, Philip Hyde went on to publish more photographs in more volumes in the series than any of the other photographers, including Eliot Porter, who was known for illustrating the best selling book of the series, In Wildness Is the Preservation of the World with quotes by Henry David Thoreau. To read more about these photographers and the development of the Sierra Club Books Exhibit Format Series see the blog post, “How Color Came To Landscape Photography.”

Though the various book projects influenced a generation of photographers and brought his work acclaim, Philip Hyde himself said, “I didn’t want to be distracted by fame.” He was more apt to spend his time working on any of many local environmental campaigns around the West, rather than talking to photography galleries, museum curators or photography agents. Although the best art museums and collectors did take interest in his work, often through recommendations from mentors such as Ansel Adams, Edward Weston and Minor White; Philip Hyde, until recently has been less well-known than some other leading landscape photographers. Now for the first time in more than a decade, Philip Hyde’s vintage black and white prints, as well as his original dye transfer and Cibachrome prints are offered by a select number of the world’s best photography galleries. To read more about the galleries who carry Philip Hyde’s work see the blog posts in the category “Galleries for Philip Hyde” or go to “About Vintage And Black And White Prints.” A limited number of his vintage and original prints are still available for viewing and acquisition on the Philip Hyde Photography website. As we scan Philip Hyde’s original vintage black and white prints and film, a few new images, and on a few rare occasions a whole new portfolio is added to PhilipHyde.com. The selection of photographs chosen for the new “Yosemite, Kings Canyon and Sierra Black and White Portfolio” were carefully reviewed by many experts in the art world, in photography galleries and by other professional photographers. Please enjoy and write me as you have questions.

What writers, artists or other influences helped you connect to a place?

Melting Snow Pattern, Kings Canyon National Park, Sierra Nevada, California, 1951 By Philip Hyde. This photograph shows the influence of Cedric Wright, at least Cedric Wright made several photographs of the groves and pock marks that form in deep melting snow as much as a decade before this photograph.

Master landscape photographer Cedric Wright wrote poetry, prose and illustrated early Sierra Club books with his fine art photography. In Galen Rowell’s renowned 1986 Sierra Club book, Mountain Light: In Search of the Dynamic Landscape, Galen Rowell quoted Cedric Wright’s 1941 “A Credo for Mountain Photographers” from the Sierra Club Boook Words of the Earth by Cedric Wright with a preface by Ansel Adams, edited by Nancy Newhall:

A Credo For Mountain Photographers

The mountain photographer is interpreting the face of nature–that mysterious infinity, eternally a refuge, a reservoir, an amplifier of spirit; a mother of dreams; a positive though elusive voice in whose depth lies its subtlety. They will interpret best who are never so content as when under the influence of situations where silence is rich in the mute assurance and beauty of mountain surroundings. The quality of emotional knowing has a finer integration with our spirit than anything that comes from barren intellectual processes. This point of view only accumulates slowly, out of long experience and contact with wordless influences. Under the spell of solitude and of natural beauty the root system of this kind of awareness establishes itself. Great art is usually created under some such saturation of awareness. The work is then permeated with an inner perception of beauty and an inner personal philosophy. The hope for our photography is that it shall retain these high lights of more than beauty, that through it symbols shall be preserved of response to our mountains, keeping them to a flow, a golden thread, in our experience.

Words of the Earth by Cedric Wright was part of the Sierra Club Exhibit Format Series. Cedric Wright and Philip Hyde both contributed a photograph to the collection of now famous photographers who joined Ansel Adams in illustrating the book This Is the American Earth written by Nancy Newhall. This Is The American Earth kicked off the Exhibit Format Series, a mastermind creation by David Brower, Nancy Newhall and Ansel Adams. This Is The American Earth was made into an exhibition and toured nationally and even in Europe. Cedric Wright’s book, Words of the Earth was also one of the early books in the series.

This Is The American Earth and Words of the Earth contained all black and white photographs. Philip Hyde’s first several books in the series were a mixture of black and white photographs and color photographs. Philip Hyde eventually had more photographs in more of the books in the series than any of the other photographers. Eliot Porter’s book In Wildness Is the Preservation of the World with quotes by Henry David Thoreau was the first all-color volume and sold more copies than all of the other Exhibit Format Series Books, including This Is The American Earth. From then on the books in the series were all in color.

(The original article appeared on the front page of the second section and incorporated five large black and white photographs by Philip Hyde)

Grass On Tarn, Sierra Nevada High Country, Kings Canyon National Park, California, 1951 by Philip Hyde. This was one of the photographs with the original Christian Science Monitor article, "Why Not Walk?" by Philip Hyde.

(To see photographs full screen Click Here.)

Next time you visit one of our national parks, why not try walking? If this proposal seems startling to you in this mechanized age, you might consider some of the qualities that make up the natural scene that is observed in our system of national parks.

One of the most rewarding aspects of nature is the exquisite beauty found in minutiae: the patterns of snow-flakes, the form of a tiny butterfly, or the interlaced perfection of leaf forms. None of these are easily observed from a moving automobile, yet most visitors to our nature preserves depend primarily on wheeled locomotion to “see” the parks.

You can look at the grand landscapes in the parks through the windshield. But to really see them you must get out of the car, at least enough to look at the foreground.

No mountain is so grand that knowing its foreground of small stones, tiny plants, and even the animals that inhabit it does not enhance its grandeur. For the natural world is not a miscellaneous collection of unrelated pieces, but a unified, harmonious whole, interacting and inter-dependent.

What is your favorite place to walk?

Do you walk when you go to national parks?

McClure Meadow, Evolution Valley, King's Canyon National Park, California, 1951 by Philip Hyde. "The Evolution Country" was one of Philip Hyde's all-time favorite places to backpack.

Continued from the blog post, “Backpacker Interview: Conservation Photographer 1.”

See also the blog post, “The 1970s Backpacking Boom, Conservation and Photography.”

This interview republished by permission of the writer Gary Braasch and Bill Kemsley, Jr., founder of Backpacker Magazine.

BACKPACKER MAGAZINE:  You have not only made your creativity into a successful way of life but taken photographs that have been instrumental in battles for very important wilderness areas. How can other photographers—skilled amateurs—use their creativity for conservation?

PHILIP HYDE:  Off the top of my head, they’d do a lot better by going to law school because it looks to me as if the fight is now in lawyer’s hands. But on a local level, an individual can do a lot by becoming familiar with a place that needs protection and by studying the issues. The camera can be an important tool to him. The person can make himself an ad hoc committee on a project and carry it along until something gets done. The weekend photographer may have an even more important role in such cases than the professional, who is always hung up on having to make a living from photography. There are thousands of causes I could donate my photographs to if I were only privately endowed.

BACKPACKER MAGAZINE:  How did your career evolve?

PHILIP HYDE:  I started in photography through nature, rather than vice versa, because of an early interest in mountains. Like everyone else, I carried a little camera around to take pictures of my favorite mountains, and one thing led to another. That was before World War II. When the war ended, just before I got out of the service, I wrote to Ansel Adams. He said he was starting a school of photography; that’s where I spent the next three years. Ansel knew I was interested in conservation and nature, and helped me get acquainted with people in the Sierra Club. My first major published photos were in the Sierra Club Bulletin of May, 1951. Making photographs of Dinosaur National Monument was the first conservation project I did for the Sierra Club. Even with that beginning my wife, Ardis, taught school for 12 years to support us.

BACKPACKER MAGAZINE:  There’s a lot of Ansel’s influence showing in your earlier work.

PHILIP HYDE:  Yes, some people have always said that. But I don’t think I ever imitated him. That picture of Yosemite is a good example of my evolution. Twenty years ago, I had great difficulty making photographs in Yosemite because all I could see was Ansel Adams, and I was sure I didn’t want to duplicate his pictures. Now I can go to Yosemite and see it through my own eyes. I have a tremendous debt to Ansel—not just for having taught me technique but for having inspired me, introduced me to the Sierra Club and helped me get on my way. I want to acknowledge that debt, but I don’t agree that my pictures have ever been more than superficially like his pictures.

BACKPACKER MAGAZINE:  Let’s discuss taking photos for straight illustration to show other people what a place is like, versus an artistic, creative image done to please yourself. The difference seems apparent in comparing many of your shots in The Wild Cascades with those in Slickrock. For instance, the photographs in the first book have much less emphasis on small detail.

PHILIP HYDE:  Several things happened between books. One was my own development. I think I started out with the idea of showing people what an area was like. When I went there I was very conscious of it as a place. Through the years as I visited more and more places, I began to realize that the PLACE, in capitals, is not really what we’re looking for after all; PLACE has become a commercial object more than anything else. To illustrate: There is no difference between Capitol Reef National Monument and Capitol Reef National Park. The place is the same, but the name change was sponsored by Utah’s industrial tourism because the term “national park” puts the place on the map. If the current wilderness proposal goes through the way it should, a very large percentage of the park will be preserved as wilderness, and the place will remain pretty much the same. Practically every book project I’ve ever worked on has had a very strong conservation aspect for saving a place. Another difference between the two books you mentioned is not the photographer’s approach but the editing. For The Wild Cascades and The Last Redwoods I produced many of the photographs, and I certainly edited them. I didn’t just dump the takes on somebody’s desk. But working with David Brower, he pretty much decided what ended up in a book. Practically all the exhibit format books were crash projects; that was Dave’s way of working. When he got an idea, he wanted to see it in a book as fast as possible. I was sympathetic to that wish because some of the places were threatened, but it often meant that the people involved didn’t really have time to do their best work I think that shows up in the photographs as well as the texts. Slickrock is a more finished book because I took all the photographs and I worked on the project a lot longer. I worked on it for several years before I ever talked to anyone about a book. I helped with the photo selection; the design and sequence of photographs were worked out by the book’s editor and a designer.

BACKPACKER MAGAZINE:  It seems more and more nature photographers and editors are using images that suggest an area or give an impression of it without being specific about the exact location or subject, such as your exquisite photos of small details in Slickrock and here in Backpacker Magazine. Do you see this as a major trend in outdoor photography?

PHILIP HYDE:  I think that aspect is coming out more and more. You know, there are common elements to any scene. During the gasoline shortage I thought; “What can I do? I’ve got to go where the wild places are and make pictures of them.” But if the subject were the little common things of nature, I wouldn’t have to travel very far. Maybe, conservation-wise, that’s what we all must do. Instead of flying off to another part of the world and burning up all that fuel getting there, maybe we should just look down at our feet. I’m fond of quoting what John Ruskin said: “There was always more in the world than a man could see, walked he ever so slowly. He will see no more for going fast.”

(See photograph full screen: Click Here.)

Mt. Denali, Reflection Pond, Alaska Range, Denali National Park, Alaska, 1971, by Philip Hyde. First published in Alaska: The Great Land by Mike Miller and Peggy Wayburn, 1974, Sierra Club Books. Helped expand Denali National Park and other wilderness in Alaska. It is a matter of record that Philip Hyde's photographs helped make more national parks than any other photographer, but Ken Burns did not mention this in his PBS Special that prominently showcased Ansel Adams' photographs. Gregarious Ansel Adams was a strong proponent of Philip Hyde's work and reserved Philip Hyde was happy to see Ansel Adams receive more recognition. Mary Street Alinder, Ansel Adams biographer, just today wrote in an e-mail that Ansel Adams thought Philip Hyde did not get what he deserved even from the Sierra Club.

The Scott Nichols Gallery is proud to present ‘Our National Parks‘. Photographs by Ansel Adams, William Bell, Wynn Bullock, Anne Brigman, Harry Callahan, Paul Caponigro, Imogen Cunningham, William Garnett, Rolfe Horn, Philip Hyde, William Henry Jackson, Rondal Partridge, Eliot Porter, Michael Rauner, Alan Ross, Don Ross, John Sexton, Carleton E. Watkins, Brett Weston, Edward Weston and others. The exhibition will be on view through March 27, 2010.

On August 25th, 1916, President Woodrow Wilson signed into law an act creating the National Park Service. Photographs made as early the 1860s by Carleton E. Watkins and his contemporaries, brought about recognition and preservation of our national treasures. This exhibition celebrates the beauty and majesty of our country’s landscape from Yosemite National Park to the Cape Cod National Seashore. Nineteenth century photographs are represented by Carelton E. Watkins’ grand Yosemite views, William Henry Jackson’s dramatic Yellowstone scenes, and William Bell and the Kolb Brothers southwestern vistas. H.C. Tibbitt’s photograph, The Fall Of The Monarch With Troop F, Sixth Cavalry, United States Army, Mariposa Grove, 1899, illustrates how the military was used to protect Yosemite before the National Park Service.

El Capitan, Winter, Yosemite National Park, California, 1948, by Ansel Adams. Courtesy Scott Nichols Gallery.

Ansel Adams’ early photographs are prominent in this exhibition, “From Glacier Point,” 1927 and “Monolith and The Face of Half Dome, Yosemite National Park,” also 1927, plus classic images from Yellowstone National Park, Grand Teton National Park, Denali National Park, and Cape Cod National Seashore. Adams received a camera and made his first trip to Yosemite in 1916. Inspired by the splendor and overwhelming sensory experience of Yosemite, Ansel Adams wrote, “a new era began for me.” He later joined the Sierra Club, became a life member and served on the board of directors. His photographic book, Sierra Nevada: The John Muir Trail influenced the creation of Kings Canyon National Park further south in California’s Sierra Nevada.

Best General View, Yosemite Valley, Circa 1867, by Carleton Watkins. Courtesy Scott Nichols Gallery.

In 1955, at the request of the National Park Service, Ansel Adams and Nancy Newhall curated an exhibition for the Sierra Club’s Le Conte Memorial building in Yosemite Valley. The exhibition and subsequent book, This Is the American Earth, first in the Exhibit Format Series, became a popular success. Exhibited across the country and Europe, the exhibition included the photographs of Wynn Bullock, William Garnett, Philip Hyde, Eliot Porter, Brett and Edward Weston, and many others featured in ‘Our National Parks’. The Exhibit Format Series expanded to dozens of books, many of which helped in campaigns to create new national parks. Ansel Adams, Eliot Porter and Philip Hyde were the primary contributors of the series.

See photograph full screen: Click Here.

Lava, Flowers, Craters of the Moon National Monument, Idaho, 1983, by Philip Hyde.

The National Park mission remains the same today as it did one hundred and fifty years ago to those inspired by the magnificence of our country’s natural wonders — to make the parks accessible to all and to preserve them for future generations.

Scott Nichols at the Scott Nichols Gallery next to Philip Hyde's "Mt. Denali, Reflection Pond" under the title script for the exhibition, by Alex Ramos with i-Phone.

Scott Nichols Gallery
49 Geary Street #415
San Francisco, California 94108
415-788-4641
www.scottnicholsgallery.com
Hours: Tuesday through Saturday, 11-5:30 and by appointment.