Posts Tagged ‘museums’

Monday Blog Blog: Derrick Birdsall

September 26th, 2011

Monday Blog Blog: Derrick Birdsall of My Sight Picture Lands A Book Deal To Photograph North Texas Frontier Forts And Lives For A Week In A Historical Log Cabin

Sunset, Log Cabin, Farmer's Branch Historical Park, Farmer's Branch, Texas, copyright 2009 Derrick Birdsall.

(See the photograph large here.)

What in the world is Monday Blog Blog? See the blog post, “Monday Blog Blog Celebration.”

Some photographers have no problem with singing their own praises or even over-blowing the merit of their own work. In contrast, many photographers and other creative people hesitate to promote themselves because either they doubt their own work, feel self-aggrandizement is tacky or any number of other reasons. My father, pioneer landscape photographer Philip Hyde, fit into the second category and architectural, historical, street and landscape photographer Derrick Birdsall does as well.

When I proposed doing a Monday Blog Blog on Derrick Birdsall and his popular blog My Sight Picture, he said something about the caliber of photographers I feature, how short a time he had been “serious” about photography and that he felt highly honored to be the subject of such a blog post. My reply was that my father liked to support and encourage those who were the most dedicated to the craft and the most accelerated in their development. Besides, Dad was always egalitarian in his association with all levels of photographers. I added that even though Landscape Photography Blogger exists to honor my father, it is my blog, doggon it, and I will feature who I want, which essentially in time will be a wide variety of landscape photographers from all over the world that I haven’t even met yet, but to start with I will feature those who I like and who support this blog the most.

Derrick Birdsall began his participation on this blog by asking in a comment if I thought that the current period was another Golden Era for photography. See comments on the blog post, “Photography’s Golden Era 2.” Ever since, he has shown a knack for asking pithy, discussion sparking and often difficult questions. I have always been amazed at his prolific volume of photography. This month, for example, he made over 20,000 exposures. Also, he puts up blog posts more frequently than any other blog I follow.

Just five years ago, Derrick Birdsall began photographing with a small Hewlett Packard “point-and-shoot” that came with a printer he bought. Because it was convenient to keep in his pocket, he took it everywhere he went. At first he had mainly an “I was here” style, but once he was out exploring around the Gila River in New Mexico and a storm blew across the canyon. Derrick “snapped” a few pictures and found that one of them had an “Ansel Adams style to it and something just clicked in my head, that I could do this.” He now photographs mainly with his Canon 7D, with his earlier Canon 50D as a backup. For post processing, he uses only Adobe Lightroom and Idealab/Google Picasa, no Photoshop.

Right away Derrick made an impression on me with his polite, Southern manner sprinkled with “please” and “thank you, Sir.” He was born in Virginia and has lived in Texas since the 4th Grade. His distinct photography in some ways is best exemplified by his photographs from his visit to Santa Fe, New Mexico. Rather than going for the landmarks: the adobe, Native Americans on the Plaza, or other typical Santa Fe clichés, his images on Smug Mug are of the land and not even of the most prominent features. He explained that this was partially circumstantial as he had attended a museum conference, took a walk and photographed what looked good to him. “A lot of times we miss something right under our noses because we’re too busy trying to put tripods where someone else already has. Part of my uniqueness is that growing up, I never spent much time looking at, or learning about art or photography. Even now, I don’t look to others’ photographs to guide what I do.”

He photographs landscapes, motorcycles, shooting competitions, airplanes, animals, architecture and many other subjects. Here’s his explanation for wide variety over specialization:

If I had my druthers, I’d be out working the Texas deserts and canyons every day with a camera. Unfortunately for me, I can’t get out there all the time, so I take images of what I have access to. There’s beauty to be found everywhere—whether that’s in a majestic desert landscape, a nice macro that you walk by every day, your dog laying out in the sun, or whatever you might pass by.  My rule number one is that to take a good picture, you’ve got to have your camera with you everywhere you go.  That way if you see something that catches your eye, you can take the time to stop and capture that moment. That being said, I think that to really capture the essence of something, you have to know it, and the images I share with folks are of things I know and love.  Basically, it’s all about ‘seeing.’  Once you start hunting for the light, you see it everywhere you go. I also use every photo opportunity as a way to become more skilled with the camera across the board. For example, I can learn something from taking an image of a hot rod and apply it to capturing reflections of a pool of water in the desert. In the short time I’ve been working at this, I’ve learned that photography is often about trial and error. Every time you hit the shutter button it’s a learning experience. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t, and the more images you take, the better you get at being able to bend the camera to your will so that you can capture the image you visualized.

The big news recently was a book deal with TSTC Publishing for a coffee table book featuring Derrick Birdsall’s photographs of the Texas Frontier Forts. Derrick Birdsall has a background in history and has been photographing the Texas Frontier Forts seriously since 2009. He earned an MA in History from Sam Houston State University and since then has been working in museums for over 20 years. He learned from a competitive shooting mentor that if you want to succeed, “you have to let other people know what your goals are and they will help you reach your goals.” Derrick Birdsall has had the goal to produce a coffee table book on the Texas Frontier Forts for some time. At one point, he collaborated with Margaret Hoogstra, who manages a cultural tourism trail centered on the Texas Frontier Forts called Texas Forts Trail. She was at a meeting with a representative from TSTC Publishing and they started talking about potential book projects. Margaret Hoogstra mentioned Derrick Birdsall’s photography of the forts. Subsequently the publisher set up a meeting in which they agreed to do the book. Derrick called it a “networking success.”

The forts project hits so many buttons for me. For starters, I am a historian by trade… I love history, always have. Secondly, the bulk of the forts are well off the beaten path and in some truly beautiful country. Thirdly, they are some of the only places you can get to anymore where you can not only see things the way they were, but you can feel it too. Standing inside some of the old buildings and hearing the wind whistling through the cracks in the walls without the interruption of modern noises is just magical to me… I can get my history fix and my landscape fix in the same breath.

The city of Farmer’s Branch, Texas has a historical city park with 28 acres of grounds and 12 structures dating from the 1840s to the 1930s. Derrick Birdsall, park Superintendent for 12 years, slept in one of the log cabins for a week this last March in commemoration of Farmer’s Branch Historical Park’s 25th Anniversary. The Dallas Morning News article shared how Superintendent Birdsall wore period clothing and cooked over an open fire to help bring frontier days to life. See the YouTube video here. The Farmer’s Branch Historical Park, with over 80,000 visitor’s a year, is an outdoor museum, special event venue and educational facility sharing the heritage of North Texas and Dallas County.

I enjoy being able to teach people… and there are definitely perks associated with the museum world. From time to time I can flash my “museum card” and get access to places that I otherwise would not have…. My museum is… not your usual gallery type setting. One of the things that just flat drives me nuts is that quite a few of the folks who work in a gallery setting are elitist snobs. It’s my belief that the objects in our care are to be shared with as many folks as possible and that visitors should have reasonable access to the artifacts. A lot of the gallery types keep everything behind glass if it’s accessible at all and more often than not you can’t even see the items because they are hiding back in the stacks. How can you educate and teach your visitors if all of your tools are locked up behind closed doors? The other thing that I notice about some folks in more traditional types of museums is that while they are often times highly educated, they only know what they’ve read, and not because they have any experience in their subject matter.  Those are the folks that talk about the rules in art and photography but if you put a paintbrush or camera in their hands they wouldn’t have the slightest idea how to use it.

When Derrick Birdsall studied museums, he attended graduate school. When he learned competition shooting, he took classes from the best marksmen in the world (See a YouTube video of the “Three Gun” type of shooting he does here). However, with photography he has been largely self-taught. He took one class online with master landscape photographer William Neill, but the rest of his training has been through trial and error in the field. He chooses photographs and guides his photography with the help of pre-visualization. In shooting competition, he made a sight picture, aligning the front and rear sight of his gun with the target. He also learned to fire between breaths, during what is called the respiratory pause. He sometimes uses this technique while photographing. As a result of his training, he can often defy the rules about when a tripod is necessary. He wrote about the parallels between both types of “shooting” in an excellent blog post appropriately called, “Sight Picture,” similar to the name of his highly visited blog My Sight Picture. Take a sight along his photo blog for yourself. You will see the work of a new voice in photography, traveling at a high velocity toward his target.

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Monday Blog Blog: Ansel Adams In The National Parks

February 28th, 2011

Book Review: Ansel Adams In The National Parks: Photographs From America’s Wild Places

Highlights Of And About The Essays And The Photographs

 

Ansel Adams In The National Parks by Ansel Adams. Little, Brown and Company, 2010. Amazon.com price $22.72.

How to add to what other reviewers have said? Ansel Adams In The National Parks has been reviewed in a number of other venues online (see list of relevant posts below), which represents a sizable marketing and publicity outlay for Little, Brown and Company. Little Brown was kind enough to send me a review copy as a gift, thank you to Little Brown and the Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust as well as the Center For Creative Photography. I imagine the other reviewers received advanced review copies to aid their review efforts too.

Below is what I like and dislike about this new release. I highly applaud the book and offer some criticism too. Ansel Adams in the National Parks: Photographs from America’s Wild Places (Amazon) is a beautiful addition to anyone’s library. The look and feel of this new volume about Ansel Adams, pleases the senses and says quality all the way, yet the book is reasonably priced at only $40.00. Considering the book displays “more than 225 photographs” and the reader discovers “many rarely seen and 50 never before published” Ansel Adams photographs. These facts alone make it worth owning. The new binding of  Ansel Adams: 400 Photographs, Ansel Adams In Color and Ansel Adams In The National Parks: Photographs From America’s Wild Places are all similar in attractive design and style: block lettering on white covers with smaller photographs on front and back.

In Ansel Adams In The National Parks I was happy to find many Ansel Adams photographs I have never seen before. The far majority of his photographs of the national parks in the book are a supreme joy to discover. There are perhaps half a dozen or less that I thought were below the standards of what Ansel Adams himself would have published. Ansel Adams was very particular about which of his photographs he printed and published. He printed only about 900 images out of his 50,000 original negatives.

I liked the notes and letters between Ansel Adams and Nancy Newhall and Beaumont Newhall, when they either traveled together or wrote to each other about Ansel Adams’ travels and photography on his Guggenheim to photograph the National Parks.

I also enjoyed reading darkroom black and white photographer John Sexton on printing Ansel Adams photographs in the 1970s.

It is always a treat to read Wallace Stegner. His essays are well-informed and well-argued. As good as his essays are, his fiction is even better. Why not use new essays rather than reprints of essays published in previous books about Ansel Adams? Plenty of high quality credentialed essayists would love the opportunity to write about Ansel Adams in the National Parks.

The essays in the back of Ansel Adams In The National Parks, sing, especially the last essay by William A. Turnage “Ansel Adams, Environmentalist.” William A. Turnage’s prose is lyrical as he praises and passionately gives tribute to his life-long friend and partner. The two essays by Richard B. Woodward, “Ansel Adams In The National Parks” on the travels of Ansel Adams, Nancy Newhall and Beaumont Newhall and “Ansel Adams and the Preservation of Wilderness,” each provide a well-written and fascinating short history lesson. In “Ansel Adams and the Preservation of Wilderness”  Richard B. Woodward wrote:

As our sense of what happened yesterday or decades ago is often as muddled and contentious as our plans for the future, a mechanical process that provides more or less realistic evidence of the world as it once was can be of immense practical and political value…. Architecture historians in several European countries understood this vital function of photography soon after Daguerre took credit for inventing it in 1839. In France the government had already founded the Commission des Monuments Historiques in 1837 and assigned it to compile a list of old decaying medieval and Renaissance structures—cathedrals, parks, chateaus, villages—imperiled by neglect…. In 1851, the Commission selected five photographers—Edourd-Denis Baldus, Hippolyte Bayard, Gustave Le Gray, Henri Le Secq, and O. Mestral—for an elite unite that operated under the name La Mission Heliographique. It was perhaps the first time, though by no means the last, that photographers were hired in a noble-minded effort to preserve valuable parts of the world, in this case a centuries-old heritage that France was in danger of forfeiting unless quick action was taken to save these crumbling and irreplaceable sites….

Richard B. Woodward continued with sections on how photographs helped protect Yosemite National Park, Yellowstone, and many other conservation causes all over the world. Then he wrote about Ansel Adams’ leadership in the transformation of photography and its establishment as an art form:

By organizing the exhibition Group f.64 in 1932—with Edward Weston, Imogen Cunningham, and others—Adams became an eloquent spokesman for “straight photography” in San Francisco and far beyond….Finally no photographer except Stieglitz did more to win acceptance for photography as a fine art. In 1940, when the Museum of Modern Art in New York created a separate department of photography, the first in the world, Adams became one of its founding fathers. Without training as a scholar or curator, he was nonetheless instrumental in the rediscovery of Watkins, Jackson, and O’Sullivan. By extolling their achievements to Beaumont Newhall and others in the museum community, he helped to construct a nascent art historical continuum for landscape photography. His own international prominence as an artist toward the end of his life altered the material conditions for those choosing to take the medium in that direction. In the 1970s, prints by Adams became one of the pillars of an emerging market for photographs as an art collectible, for sale in galleries and auction houses. The select but not inconsiderable number of photographers lucky enough to earn a living today from sales of their prints have Adams to thank for proving this could be done. Despite an altered context and a newfound respect for photographers within the realm of contemporary art, his pictures remain basic to the photography market and show no sign of diminishing in prevalence twenty-five years after his death.

Related Posts:

“Ansel Adams In The National Parks” Ansel Adams Gallery

“Black And White Prints, Collectors And Philip Hyde” Fine Art Photography Collector’s Resource

“Ansel Adams In The National Parks” National Parks Traveler

“Ansel Adams In The National Parks” Travel Blissful

“Review: Ansel Adams In The National Parks” JMG Galleries

“Ansel Adams In The National Parks” Photonaturalist

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Mexico City And Oaxaca Travel Log

December 20th, 2010

Mexico City And Oaxaca 1990 Travel Log

Excerpts From Ardis Hyde’s 1990 Mexican Travel Log

Men Of Oaxaca Waiting For The Train, City Of Oaxaca, State Of Oaxaca, Mexico, 1990 by Philip Hyde. When I first discovered this photograph in Dad's files, it did not have a name or description but it was in the Oaxaca section. I called it "Men of Oaxaca." I didn't even know where it was in Oaxaca. However, I found it in the Travel Logs called, "Waiting For The Train, Oaxaca Train Station." This is what it is now called on the website. However, I have been referring to it on the blog as, "Men Of Oaxaca Waiting For The Train" so that people know it is the same photograph. Eventually I will drop "Men of Oaxaca" because we don't really know if they are from Oaxaca or not. They are just waiting in the train station.

(To see the photograph full-screen Click Here.)

Mexico City (Ciudad de Mexico) is the Federal District (Distrito Federal) capital, largest city in the Americas, and the third largest city in the world after Seoul and Tokyo. My mother Ardis Hyde abbreviated the Mexico City airport as “Mex DF”, short for Mexico Distrito Federal. My father landscape photographer Philip Hyde was 68 years old and my mother was 64 when they boarded a Continental flight from Reno to Houston via Denver on January 4,1990. My mother wrote:

Clear skies on takeoff from Denver. The Airbus to Houston left more than half an hour late. The wide body plane had seats seven and eight abreast at intervals. We had two seats, one by a window. We could see the front range of the Rockies, pure white with fresh snow. Despite a tail wind, we arrived late in Houston. It was very slow deplaning. We hurried through the huge terminal searching for our gate. We inquired of a courtesy car and the driver told us to hop aboard. We would never have made it without his help. It was a long way to the gate. We were the last to board and almost missed our flight. Clouds covered Mexico City solidly. On the ground in Mexico City, where we arrived on time, we groped around finding our way. We bought pesos and finally exited customs after filling out many forms but moving quickly past the officials. Dusk brought heavy traffic negotiated by taxi to the Ritz Hotel at Madera 30: $43.50 a night with senior discount. Room 510 was quiet and appointed well but not fancy. We were exhausted from the trip and went to bed early.

Future blog posts and eventual releases of new photographs will illustrate the activities of the following days in Mexico City. My mother wrote, “Philip was happily snapping 35 mm pictures” in the city center of street life, of El Sagrario, the old Cathedral, of the bustle and of the art in the city center. At the Palacio National, the Mexican seat of government since the Aztec Empire, many of the palace’s building materials originally belonged to Montezuma. My mother continued, “Philip made a fascinating study of the Diego Rivera Murals on the second floor, in the back courtyard and in the Hall of the Constitution.”

The Hydes attended the Epiphany, 12th Day of Christmas and Dia de Reyes, gift giving to children. They explored the Museo de la Ciudad de Mexico and many other museums. They tried staying in different hotels. They saw the “beautiful glass ceiling of the Gran Hotel,” and visited the Universidad to make photographs of the Diego Rivera murals on the library exterior. They took the autobus to the Teotihuacan Pyramids.

On January 15, the Hydes took a taxi to the train station bound for the City of Oaxaca in the State of Oaxaca:

At the train station we visited in line with two Americans Philip recognized from our hotel, as well as Earl and Shirley Binin, our friends from Connecticut, all boarding the same train to Oaxaca. The train to Oaxaca pulled out promptly at 7:00 pm. We had a neat ‘Alcoba,’ sleeper room and dinner included with our ticket. The diner car was neat and clean. After a visit in the diner car with the Binins we went off to our Alcoba to go to bed early. It was a bumpy ride all night. The train never went very fast. I was in the upper bunk and Philip took the lower. We slept OK. We woke up early and watched the daylight appear through the train windows. Outside we saw mountains, a river gorge and flowing streams through a forest of Kaypok trees. We had breakfast at 7:15 am as the train progressed out onto cultivated flatter terrain. We arrived in Oaxaca at 9:30 am. Philip made photographs in the Oaxaca train station. One was of three men waiting for the train. They were as weathered and tired-looking as the old worn wall of the train station behind them.

More to come…

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The Flowers Of San Francisco

August 5th, 2010

Flowers of San Francisco, Downtown San Francisco, California 2009 by David Leland Hyde. Nikon D90. Camera Raw.

If you’re going to San Francisco,

Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair.

If you come to San Francisco,

Summer time will be a love-in there.

Wall Design, Trees, San Francisco, California, 2010 by David Leland Hyde. Nikon D90. Camera Raw.

The popular 1967 song written by John Phillips of the Mamas and Papas and sung by Scott McKenzie, inspired thousands of young people to travel to San Francisco in the late 1960s and is still inspiring visitors and natives of San Francisco to this day. San Francisco in the summer time is the place to escape the heat and experience all forms of art and fine art, perhaps a place to create your own art.

A Friend Twirling and Dancing In Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, California, 2009 by David Leland Hyde. Nikon D90. Camera Raw.

Starting in the mid-20th Century and for many generations San Francisco has been a hotbed of art and is no less a major incubator of artists today than in any other era. Life’s rich pageant blooms in many colors and races in San Francisco. San Francisco is a collage of opposites, of old and new, industry and art, wisdom and foolishness, wealth and poverty.

Golden Gate Bridge Span and Marin Headlands, San Francisco, California, 2009 by David Leland Hyde. Nikon D90. Camera Raw.

It was the birthplace of the Sierra Club, the Exhibit Format Series, perhaps even landscape photography, the Beat Generation, earthquake insurance, the Summer of Love, the sexual revolution, the anti-war movement, Friends of the Earth, Earth Island Institute, Bank of America, Bechtel, Jefferson Airplane, Jerry Garcia, Courtney Love, William Randolph Hearst, Robert McNamara, Robert Frost, Jack London, Gary Snyder, Ansel Adams, Philip Hyde, Clint Eastwood, Bruce Lee, Val Kilmer, Steve Jobs, Jim Jones, O. J. Simpson, Rob Schneider, Jerry Brown and 407 other celebrities.

Stan Zrnich and Himself at the California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco, California, 2009 by David Leland Hyde. Colors digitally altered.

I visit San Francisco several times a year to go to San Francisco art galleries, photography galleries, museums and libraries for research and as ambassador of my father’s photography. When I am there I feel a quickening as I am artistically moved, culturally enlightened and creatively freed.

Reflections, San Francisco, California, 2010 by David Leland Hyde. Nikon D90. Camera Raw.

My father, who was born in San Francisco, escaped the city and spent most of his life photographing wilderness. Ironically, I was born in the wilderness and do photograph nature often, but feel like I could easily spend the rest of my life photographing San Francisco.

Lines Curving Into The Sun, San Francisco, California, 2009 by David Leland Hyde. Nikon D90.

When I am in The City, as northern Californians call it, I often feel compelled to write about or photograph this diverse built landscape of fog, cable cars and the big red bridge.

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Posted in David's Perspective

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Photography’s Golden Era 5

June 7th, 2010

(Continued from the blog post, “Photography’s Golden Era 4.”)

Cover of Book on Paul Strand by Mark Haworth-Booth, Aperature, 2009.

The earliest beginnings of straight photography go back to 1915 when politics, the arts and sciences were in a state of revolution. Cubism, Freudian psychoanalysis, Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and the new rhythms of Jazz swept the country. “Everything was changing, but in photography the Pictorialists were still evoking foggy, romantic images of the past,” said American Photography: A Century of Images by PBS Home Video.

“One photographic artist would lead the medium into the modern age,” American Photography said. “His name was Paul Strand.” Aperture recently published a new book on Paul Strand in their Masters of Photography Series called Paul Strand by Mark Haworth-Booth.

Before Paul Strand’s work became known and for some time afterward, Pictorialists smeared Vaseline on their lenses to soften their images. They scratched their negatives to add texture. “They even painted chemicals on their prints to simulate brush strokes. The purpose was to make photography a hand-made process like other arts.” Pictorialist photographs looked like drawings or paintings with Chiaroscuro—light and dark contrasted effects, sketchiness and dreamy haziness.

Paul Strand, as part of the school of ideas and art that Alfred Stieglitz advanced, had his work published in Alfred Stieglitz’ magazine Camera Work and exhibited in Alfred Stieglitz’ Gallery 291. Paul Strand had been working for a few years on his own in 1915 when he brought his new work to Alfred Stieglitz to review. Alfred Stieglitz looked at the portfolio and said, “Young man, this is it. You have created a new and modern art.” Paul Strand used the camera to capture shapes and forms simply, directly and in sharp focus. Rather than depending on the skill of manipulation of the photograph after it left the camera, artistic quality depended on the eye of the photographer. Paul Strand’s images further revolutionized photography through the introduction of the abstract forms that he had observed in modernist paintings at Gallery 291. Paul Strand’s enthusiasm for sharp-focused realism was shared by a new generation of photographers: Edward Weston, Imogen Cunningham, Walker Evans and others.

Nonetheless, by the early 1930s, Pictorialist photographs employing soft-focus, manipulated prints and painterly visions engaged their poetic moods and romantic scenes in a lively exchange among juried camera club competitions. “In the West, large numbers of Pictorialist photographers continued to take prizes at Bay Area salons…” wrote Therese Thau Heyman in her essay “Perspective On Seeing Straight” in the book Seeing Straight: The F.64 Revolution in Photography. “Pictorialist thinking and theory was at its most articulate in the mid-1020s. William Mortensen, a leading and vocal Pictorialist, later explained, ‘The business of a work of art is to make an effect, not to report a fact.’ Creating effects was pictorialism’s highest calling.” Mortensen claimed that without selection and artistry, “the camera has no more artistic potentiality than a gas-meter.”

Sides were drawn up. One unnamed speaker in a debate said of Edward Weston’s work that he had “dared more than the legion of brittle sophisticates and polished romanticists ever dreamed.” Edward Weston turned away from pictorialist methods eight or nine years before a Bay Area group of straight photographers formed Group f.64. In 1930 Edward Weston commented in his Daybooks of Edward Weston, “I wrote an article, published this July with examples of my work in ‘Camera Craft,’ a photo magazine which offers its readers just what they want…. I tempered my words, fearing the editor might not stand up under full blast. But seeing some unusually awful reproductions in the same issue by one Boris, with a laudatory article by the editor, I spent an hour writing him my mind. These cheap abortions which need no description other than their titles, ‘Pray,’ ‘Greek Slave,’ ‘Orphans,’ ‘Unlucky Day,’ have nothing to do with Art, nor Life, nor Photography. So I not very gently explained. But why did I waste my time? I know the editor’s policy, his outlook from his writings and magazine in general: backing my work and opinions, his publication would fail. I am in the mood to stir things up.”

Meeting Paul Strand in Taos changed Ansel Adams’ life direction as he turned away from his development as a concern pianist, to full-time pursuit of photography as a profession. When he returned to San Francisco, Ansel Adams gave up his textured photographic papers and began using the same smooth papers used by Paul Strand and Edward Weston. This revealed more detail in his prints and allowed him to “achieve a greater feeling of light and range of tones….” For more about the photography of Paul Strand see the blog post, “Straight Photography And Abstraction.”

“My work might interest you at this time,” Ansel Adams wrote to Paul Strand. “Stieglitz, with whom I had many fine hours in New York this spring, was very helpful and encouraging.” Ansel Adams invited Paul Strand to exhibit his work in San Francisco in a modest gallery that Ansel Adams had opened, but Paul Strand turned the aspiring photographer down objecting to exhibitions in general. For more on this story and Paul Strand see the blog post, “Ansel Adams and Paul Strand on Self-Promotion and Exhibitions.” Undaunted Ansel Adams wrote back to tell the black and white photography master that he understood. However he felt that some contribution, however small, could be made to photography by putting on the right kind of exhibitions. Some of the earliest exhibitions at the Ansel Adams Gallery in San Francisco were of the work of a new group of photographers dedicated to straight photography called Group f.64.

“I certainly wish I could see what you are doing in Mexico,” Ansel Adams wrote in his second letter to Paul Strand. “I have always had things happen to me—psychologically, even physically—when I have seen your things. I believe you have made the one perfect and complete definition of photography. Stieglitz is to me the great catalyst; he has taken rare mental and emotional material and turned it into creative channels…. I have often wondered what Stieglitz would have been had he concentrated entirely on his own work.

When Ansel Adams described his response to Paul Strand’s negatives to the photographers who in their next meeting became Group f.64, he found they were all in accord with pursuing what they at first called “pure photography” and later called straight photography as Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand called it. They did not meet often as a group, but provided  moral support for each other. At the second meeting the young photographer Preston Holder suggested they call themselves ‘US 256’, the smallest aperture or lens opening setting that allowed for the greatest sharpness and depth. Because the new aperture system called this smallest setting f.64, Ansel Adams wrote down f.64 and all agreed.

Group f.64 composed a manifesto that defined the group’s purpose and philosophy. It said the name “signifies to a large extent the qualities of clearness and definition of the photographic image…Group f.64 limits its members and invitational names to those workers who are striving to define photography as an art form by simple and direct presentation through purely photographic methods. The Group will show no work at any time that does not conform to its standards of pure photography. Pure photography is defined as possessing no qualities of technique, composition or idea, derivative of any other art form. The production of the “Pictorialist,” on the other hand, indicates a devotion to principles of art which are directly related to painting and the graphic arts. The members of Group f.64 believe that photography, as an art from, must develop along lines defined by the actualities and limitations of the photographic medium, and must always remain independent of ideological conventions of art and aesthetics that are reminiscent of a period and culture antedating the growth of the medium itself.” The manifesto also committed the group to “present in frequent shows what it considers the best contemporary photography of the West.”

One of Group f.64’s early supporters was Lloyd Rollins, director of the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco. Lloyd Rollins attended a gathering of the group at Willard Van Dyke’s home, viewed their photographs and offered them their first exhibition. This was Ansel Adams’ third major museum show and a break for the other group members as well. The group handed out copies of their manifesto at the show. The public and critical response was vigorous and often negative. Though many letters criticized Rollins for supporting a medium “that was not art,” the museum board continued to support the young pioneers.

The Group f.64 exhibitions drew both praise and criticism in the respected journal Camera Craft. A supporter of Pictorialism, reviewer Sigismund Blumann, in the May 1933 issue wrote,”The name of the organization was intriguing. The show was recommended to us as something new, not as individual work might go, but as a concerted effort specifically aimed at exploiting the trend. We went with a determined and preconceived intention of being amused and, if need be, adversely critical. We came away with several ideals badly bent and not a few opinions wholly destroyed…. The group is creating a place for photographic freedom. You will enjoy these prints. You will be impressed, astounded.” Articles by Los Angeles photographer William Mortensen in the same magazine were not so complimentary.

As part of the debate and to counter some of William Mortensen’s assertions, Ansel Adams wrote impassioned responses. These two famous photographers and proponents of their respective styles, argued so intensely in print that it expanded readership and multiplied interest in the controversy and photography in general, ultimately resulting in more supporters of the cause of straight photography. Ansel Adams described William Mortensen’s work: “His photographs were of models suggesting classic and Renaissance characters in historical and allegorical situations while in various stages of nakedness and period costume. They were just plain awful.” William Mortensen and Ansel Adams engaged in one of the fiercest debates in art history.

(The blog post to come, “Photography’s Golden Era 6” will begin to cover Ansel Adam’s Zone System and the founding of the photography department at the California School of Fine Arts that Philip Hyde attended starting in 1946.)

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Photography Workshops Taught By Philip Hyde

April 5th, 2010

(New content has bee added to four of the sub-tabs under INFO on the Philip Hyde Photography website. For example: under Workshops As Instructor, the text below has been added. More to come…)

El Capitan, Clouds, Fall, Yosemite Valley, Yosemite National Park, 1973 by Philip Hyde. Made while visiting Yosemite Valley to teach at the Ansel Adams Gallery Workshops. New York Life Insurance made this Yosemite classic into a poster. The New York Life logo was taken from the outline of El Capitan in this photograph.

(To see the photograph full screen Click Here.)

In 1952, two years after Philip Hyde had earned a certificate of completion from Ansel Adam’s Photography Program at the California School of Fine Arts; Minor White, lead instructor, asked him to return as a guest lecturer and guest teaching assistant. In the summer of 1968, the Ansel Adams Gallery invited Philip Hyde to attend an Ansel Adams Gallery Workshop taught by Ansel Adams and others. The next summer Philip Hyde became a teaching assistant and by the early 1970s, Philip Hyde was a co-instructor with Ansel Adams and other luminaries in various workshops such as Morley Baer, Dorr Bothwell, Norman Locks, Alan Ross, Dave Bohn, Yousef Karsh, Bob Kolbrenner, William Garnett, Steve Crouch, David Cavagnaro, Roger Minick, Ralph Putzker, Arnold Newman, Wynn Bullock, Jerry Uelsmann, John Upton and others. Philip Hyde sometimes taught the Ansel Adams June Workshop with Ansel Adams and other instructors, other years Philip Hyde co-taught the Color Workshop and some years he taught both workshops.

Philip Hyde also taught photography workshops for such organizations as the Museum of Northern Arizona, Friends of Photography, John Sexton, Morningbird Ranch, Sierra Photographic Center, Tahoe-Truckee Photographic Workshops, Utah Museum of Natural History, UCSC Extension, Anderson Ranch, Ray McSavaney, Point Reyes Field Seminars, Sea Ranch, Yosemite In Winter, Kenab Workshops, Piet Van de Mark, Owens Valley Photography Workshops, The Alaska Photographic Workshops and Nature Photography Expeditions International.

We are talking about many years of workshops, a lot of material taught. Much insight and inspiration…

More details to come…

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Leonardo Da Vinci Used A Camera

March 5th, 2010

A camera obscura box with a mirror at an angle of 45 degrees throwing the image on a glass at the top of the box, a configuration resembling the later film reflex camera. Courtesy of Wikimedia.

G. B. Wright in the November 1955 issue of Modern Photography Magazine wrote that “The History of Photography From 1839 to the Present Day” by Beaumont Newhall is “the one single source on the subject in English which is both reliable and exceedingly interesting.” First published by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York in 1937, if you look on Amazon.com today you will see that “The History of Photography” 5th Edition, published in 2010 is now available.

“Camera pictures have been made ever since the Renaissance,” Beaumont Newhall begins his definitive volume. “Artists turned to mathematics and optics for assistance in solving perspective problems, and they found the phenomenon of the camera obscura (literally “dark room”) a mechanical aid of the greatest value. Leonardo da Vinci described the principle: light entering a minute hole in the wall of a darkened room forms on the opposite wall an inverted image of whatever lies outside.”

Italian Renaissance artist Giovanni Battista della Porta, first published a description of how the camera helped the draftsman accurately depict perspective drawings, in his 1558 book “Natural Magic.” Danielo Barbaro, a University of Padua professor, wrote a treatise on perspective and showed that a more vivid image could be projected by replacing the pinhole with a lens. He explained that by “holding the paper steady you can trace the whole perspective with a pen, shade it and delicately color it from nature.”

The camera started as the size of a room, but grew smaller over time. Beaumont Newhall recounts that in the 17th and 18th Centuries, a lens was often fixed in one end of a two foot box and a sheet of frosted glass on the other, on which the resulting image could be seen outside the camera. Count Francesco Algarotti in his 1764 “Essay on Painting,” said, “The best modern painters among the  Italians have availed themselves greatly of this contrivance; nor is it possible they should have otherwise represented things so much to life.”

A century of experimentation ensued before the painter Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre produced the first photograph in 1837. Stay tuned for the story of M. Daguerre and the first photograph…

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Covered Wagon Journal 2

February 10th, 2010

Covered Wagon Journal 2

Extracts from the Summer 1955 Journal of Travels Through the Western National Parks and Monuments

By Philip Hyde

(CONTINUED FROM BLOG POST, “Covered Wagon Journal 1“)

Near Water's Edge, Mile 25, Colorado River, Grand Canyon National Park, Arizona, 1964, by Philip Hyde. First published in "Time and the River Flowing: Grand Canyon" by Francois Leydet, in the Sierra Club Exhibit Format Series. The book that helped save the Grand Canyon from being flooded by two dams. Some recent writers have said that the book came out of a 1964 river trip led by riverguide and Sierra Club Board member Martin Litton and Executive Director David Brower, with passengers who included the who's who of nature photography and natural science at the time, this is partially true. Others have credited Philip Hyde with being the sole photographer of the book. For all time, let's set the record straight: The photographers for "Time and The River Flowing" with the number of their photographs are as follows: Philip Hyde--31 photographs, Clyde Childress--18, David Brower--10, Martin Litton (using the name Clyde Thomas)--9, Joseph C. Hall--9, Richard Norgaard--6, Ansel Adams--5 (all color), P. T. Reilly--4, Daniel B. Luten--3, Eliot Porter--2, Joseph Wood Krutch--2, and Katie Lee--1.

June 14. We were thoroughly awakened at 4:30 a.m. by a crescendo in the chorus of rain that had been constant for most of the night. A short time after it began, it was coming into the tent in wholesale quantities. A large rock falling off the ledge above us tore a huge gap in the tent and we were forced to leave. Fortunately, it hit to one side, missing us. As we ran toward shelter under some large boulders, we heard an ominous roaring, and looked up to see a full-blown waterfall cascading down into what had been the camp kitchen. But for the quick thinking of some of those who had been sleeping close to the kitchen, much of our equipment and supplies might have been carried into the Colorado River. What a demonstration of the power of a flash flood. When the excitement subsided, we looked around in the sunrise light to see the canyon walls draped with hundreds of waterfalls coming down off the rims.

June 19. A little while ago we emerged onto the crowded South Rim of the Grand Canyon, after two days in the lower regions. The first half of the climb was easy, in the cool pre-dawn hours. Once past the half-way point at Indian Springs and the last water, the trail climbs as steeply as a jet plane. And by this time the sun was up, ready to greet us on the shadeless upper bench. With considerable effort, we managed to push ourselves up the trail to the rim, and paused to rest. Then we turned and looked back. As in Yosemite, where the sheer height of El Capitan, or the great depth of Yosemite Valley never quite make a full impression until one has climbed on foot to Glacier Point, or to the top of Yosemite Falls, so it is with the Grand Canyon—the vast abyss seemed grown a hundredfold after climbing on our own legs from the river.

June 24. We have spent the day and much of the night looking at the exhibits of the Museum of Southern Utah, in Kenab, and talking to the Johnstons, who operate it. The museum’s collection of ancient and recent Indian artifacts is exceptionally interesting. Yesterday, we spent part of the day in a canyon in the Arizona Strip to the south, looking at ancient Indian paintings. We were also directed to a “dig” which the museum’s archeologist is developing across Kenab Creek. A burial which he excavated is now on display in the museum.

June 30. We are now on the fabled Yampa River. Our boatman, Dave Rasmussen, turns over his oars to another member of the crew, and picks his guitar for an hour or more of wonderful music that floats out over the lazily moving river and echoes softly from the yellow sandstone walls, sheer cliffs, and rounded domes. We slip around the great curving river bends with no sound but the melody of guitar and soft singing.

July 1. We have seen three golden eagles soaring high over us as we threaded through the climax of Yampa River scenery—the run through the magnificently formed series of bends in the river that begins just below Castle Park. The walls have heightened, and grown more nearly perpendicular, and, at intervals, the river straightens out long enough to provide a vista down the canyon, sweeping from a foreground of river and concentrically curved sandbars, to a prominent feature carved out of the rim, standing at the far turn of the wall. There are so many of these impressive views on the Yampa, that one loses himself trying to recall the exact location of each. We can only hope, after the recent difficult struggle to preserve this unique canyon in its natural integrity, that it will stay this way, so that we can return, and so that future generations can come and be thrilled and inspired as we have been. This day of days is capped with the rising of the near-full moon, flooding its light over the great cliffs that surround us here in our Box Elder camp.

July 14. The bus brought us to the Gates of Lodore, in Brown’s Park, on the northern boundary of Dinosaur National Monument, where a short afternoon run has brought us just a few miles inside the Gates of Lodore. I wonder if John Wesley Powell and the other early river travelers who came to this place received any premonitions of disaster when they looked upon this impressive mountain gate. Here the Green River meanders for some miles through the tranquil bottomlands of Brown’s Park, resting from its exertion in Flaming Gorge upstream. Then, for no apparent reason, it turns abruptly and plunges into this high plateau’s escarpment. The introduction to Lodore is sudden. Once within the Gates, you are committed, and you know this is a formidable canyon. Even the rapids are anxious to start; there are several short but vigorous ones just a short distance inside the Gates of Lodore. The canyon quickly reaches its full height, the brick-colored walls rising in coves and steps whose treads are often carpeted with tall evergreens.

July 16. At Hell’s Half Mile the water is so low that the beginning of the rapid is a waterfall of about six feet. Our party is scattered on the stream-side rocks to watch…

(CONTINUED IN BLOG POST, “Covered Wagon Journal 3“)

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Photography’s Golden Era 2

February 4th, 2010

Photography’s Golden Era 2

(CONTINUED FROM BLOG POST, “Photography’s Golden Era 1“)

Are We Currently in Another Golden Era of Photography?

HEY, THAT’S NOT ART!!!!!

Volcan From South of Colima, Mexico, 1995, by Philip Hyde. A "contemporary" Philip Hyde photograph, the last time he traveled in Mexico before he lost his eyesight. This less landscape and more landscaping image will not be printed for some time. It will eventually be part of the Mexico Portfolio, that contains many architectural and travel style photographs with a more "post-modern" feel.

After the first post on Photography’s Golden Era, one of the responses has been rolling around in the back 40 of my vacuous mind. A photographer named Derrick Birdsall of “My Sight Picture” said he enjoyed the “walk back in time,” and when I asked him what else he would like to see covered on the subject he wrote: “David, as a historian (and neophyte photographer) myself, I enjoyed the perspective you shared. Gotta know where you’ve been if you want to know where you’re going. As for future topics… why would you say that the “Golden Era” was in the past? Some could argue that with all of the technology more or less readily available and affordable today that we are currently in a Golden Era today?? I’m not arguing the point, but I’d be interested to hear your views on the matter.”

Interesting questions, and put to me in an open-ended, ‘let’s see what you think’ manner. I couldn’t resist. I decided to offer my take on it here. It would be fun to hear what others think too. Are we in a new Golden Era, or in the pits of the cherries now? Here’s my response, edited again…

Hi Derrick,
Great questions. I did not label the period from 1946 to 1955 at the California School of Fine Arts when Minor White was lead instructor and the time just before that in the San Francisco Bay Area when Group f.64 formed. Photo historians and curators including Ken and Victoria Whyte Ball in their forthcoming book, The Golden Decade: Photography at the California School of Fine Arts 1945-1955 (written about in the blog post, “The Golden Decade: California School of Fine Arts Photography“) have called it the Golden Era because the energy, creativity, optimism and serious commitment of the G.I.s coming out of WW II and looking to get on with their lives, meshed with the gathering of the greatest teachers and innovators photography has ever seen. At a unique time when there had been no fine art photography before, it all came together in one place and brought forth photography that will endure “forever” if that is possible.

Definitely a good point you raise about the current day. On the internet synergy occurs, though at times it seems much less like a coming together of the greatest talents and more like dispersion in a million directions. See also the blog post, “Is Landscape Photography Thriving Or Dying.” I’m new to the forums, though my impression is that they are mainly a training ground for the accelerated honing of new photographer’s skills. Certainly the old pros are around in places too. Photography is changing faster than ever. The technology is allowing for just about anyone to make a good photograph now and then. However, does that define a Golden Era? The various directions will have to settle out a bit to find out.

Lorraine Anne Davis, in her Black and White Magazine column “Curator’s Corner” interviewed Lynne Warren, curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago for the April 2008 issue. Lynne Warren said, “I was getting pretty cynical about the emphasis on large-scale color work, often poorly executed—it just seemed all the rage. Too many artists seemed to think they could just pick up a digital camera and shoot, knowing nothing about photography. But I’ve seen a change. Younger photographers seem to be getting very serious about their craft, and realizing that if you want a photo to look a certain way, you had better be able to consciously achieve it rather than accepting whatever comes out of your digital camera.” A lot of excellent work is out there. However, forgive me for being blunt, and I certainly don’t think this is always the case, but there are too many sunsets, sunrises, contrived drama, over-saturated colors and people following formulas they read in somebody’s 17 quick tips.

My father, master landscape photographer Philip Hyde, often quoted Minor White who said sunsets are cliché. Both Minor White and Philip Hyde, and Ansel Adams for that matter, taught that photography is more of a Zen-like practice of stilling the mind, opening the eyes and seeing deeply. There isn’t anything quick about it. Also, Dad said that in order to photograph nature, it is necessary to understand something about the subject, to spend time out there away from the iPod, iPad, iPhone, IBM, IPO, ISP, IMF, IOU and IRS.

Another issue that Lynne Warren and Lorraine Anne Davis did not even touch is the effects of Photoshop on the medium. Will the transformations of photography through digital technologies ultimately improve the quality of the best art? Hard to say this soon. Ansel Adams’ silver prints, Philip Hyde’s dye transfer prints and Christopher Burkett’s Cibachrome prints have yet to be matched by anyone printing in digital. It will be interesting to see later if the beginning of the digital era will indeed be seen as a Golden Era. This may be a settling out era. It may bring about some kind of Renaissance, but has the Renaissance already started? Hmmm, we’ll see. Because many of the big scenes have been done, now many museums are collecting mainly quirky, bizarre, experimental stuff. It may be “Golden” or it may be merely the birth of what is essentially a new medium, searching to find itself.

Much of what I also see are various ways of changing photographs to look more like paintings or some other related visual art that is not straight photography, but is more like a reincarnation of the pictorialism that held photography back from becoming its own art form. Alfred Stieglitz in New York, and the members of Group f.64 in San Francisco, set photography free with Straight Photography. Lorraine Anne Davis is also a prominent appraiser with another column in Black and White Magazine called “What’s It Worth.” In a piece about the work of Edmund Teske, she wrote, “After photography broke from Pictorialism at the beginning of the 20th Century and embraced Modernism, it soon became stuck in the trap of Straight Photography.” Many people believe that the parameters of realism hold photography back, but everyone is free to create whatever they choose. If you paint over old photographs, you move into a different art form altogether, as with many of the new directions in digital, often inspired by Photoshop. Read more on the effects and techniques of Photoshop in the blog post, “Monday Blog Blog: Photoshop For Pros.” More power to them, but they are not what Ansel Adams and Edward Weston called “pure” photography and they are more experimental than “great” at this juncture, in my opinion.

So how do you feel about the current era? Is it a new Golden Age? Or the doom of everything grand? Take a gander, what will the future hold?

(Continued in the blog post, “Photography’s Golden Era 3“

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58 Years In The Wilderness Intro 2

January 18th, 2010

Drake's Beach, Point Reyes National Seashore, California, 1972, by Philip Hyde. From the Reprint of "Island In Time: Point Reyes Peninsula." (Out of Print)

(See the photograph full screen: Click Here.)

(CONTINUED FROM BLOG POST, “58 Years In The Wilderness Intro 1“)

Why did the pair spend one third of their lives pursuing this unusual brand of adventure?

As the 1950s became the 1960s, groups like the Sierra Club, the Wilderness Society, the Izaak Walton League, the National Audubon Society and the National Wildlife Federation brought public attention to protecting and enjoying nature. Howard Zahniser of the Wilderness Society authored the Wilderness Act legally defining wilderness. In 1962, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring came out in protest of chemical spraying and exposed corporate environmental negligence. The same year, Sierra Club Books released In Wildness Is The Preservation of the World with color photographs by Eliot Porter with quotes from Henry David Thoreau and Island in time: The Point Reyes Peninsula by Harold Gilliam with photographs by Philip Hyde. These were the first two widely distributed books with large color fine art landscape photographs sharing the beauty of nature. While Eliot Porter’s book was all color, Philip Hyde mixed beautiful vintage black and white photographs with large color plates. Dad was recognized as a master of both mediums, though as color caught on, Porter’s book sold more copies. A handful of photographers, through the Sierra Club and its leader David Brower, brought wilderness right to the United States Congress and Senate and into living rooms across the country. The Sierra Club had reinvented the large picture book as the Exhibit Format Series. These high-quality coffee table volumes represented, as never before, the wild places the Sierra Club wanted to protect.

Photographs first helped preserve wilderness in 1864, moving President Abraham Lincoln to establish Yosemite as the world’s first scenic land preserve. Yet in the 1950s and 1960s the use of the camera to defend wilderness reached its zenith. More preserves, wildernesses, National Parks and Monuments formed out of campaigns by environmental groups than ever as America’s leaders and people saw natural landscapes through a “new” medium. During the heyday of the Sierra Club publishing program, Club membership grew exponentially. The first book in the series, This Is The American Earth featured primarily the work of Ansel Adams though other well-known western photographers such as Eliot Porter, Philip Hyde, Edward Weston, Pirkle Jones, Minor White and Cedric Wright had one or two photographs. Ansel Adams, Eliot Porter and Philip Hyde became the primary illustrators of the series. Dad’s photographs in particular, appeared in eight out of the sixteen books published in the sequence. Several volumes in the series became bestsellers and this combined with Washington DC lobbying, brought the Sierra Club into national prominence.

After marrying in June 1947, Dad and Mom joined the Sierra Club later that year while Dad started photography school. The Club had just over 900 members, but within the next two decades the ranks swelled to over one million. Other conservation organizations like the Wilderness Society also grew exponentially and many new organizations formed.

Photography itself had undergone a transformation as well. Soft focus pictorialism dominated the first third of the 1900s. Few photographers successfully bucked the trend toward printing on canvas and other art papers, soft focus and special effects that made photographs resemble paintings, until Alfred Stieglitz published a magazine called Camera Work in which he began to encourage what he called “straight photography.” Photographers in the Western United States increasingly made photographs of landscapes without people. Only a few pioneers had captured landscapes previously, they were not common. In 1932 photographers Willard Van Dyke, Imogen Cunningham, Edward Weston, Henry Swift, Sonya Noskowiak, John Paul Edwards and Ansel Adams formed Group f.64 in San Francisco. Named after f.64, the smallest lens setting enabling the most detail in a photograph, the group composed a manifesto limiting “members and invitational names to those workers who are striving to define photography as an art form by simple and direct presentation through purely photographic methods… Pure photography is defined as possessing no qualities of technique, composition or idea, derivative of any other art form.”

In the mid 1940s, Group f.64 member Ansel Adams founded a fine art Photography Department, the first ever of its kind, at the California School of Fine Arts, now the San Francisco Arts Institute. When Ansel Adams first started the department, students of painting, sculpture and other disciplines erupted into a school-wide protest against photography being part of a fine art school. In those days, photography was not considered an art form, let alone a fine art. Yet Ansel Adams persisted with encouragement and support from San Francisco art patron Albert Bender and other California art movers, as well as fellow photographers such as Paul Strand in the Midwest, whose work appeared in Camera Work, and from Alfred Stieglitz himself. Group f.64 members Edward Weston and Imogen Cunningham helped teach at the California School of Fine Arts. Besides Philip Hyde, the program turned out such notable photographers as Pirkle Jones, Ruth-Marion Baruch, Charles Wong, Bill Heick, Cameron Macaulay, Benjamen Chinn, Don Whyte, Rose Mandel, Bob Hollingsworth, Stan Zrnich, Pat Harris Noyes, David Johnson, Ira Latour, Gerald Ratto, John Upton, Walter Stoy,  and others.

With three years of photography school and a certificate of completion, Dad built on what became known as the west coast tradition and went on to influence a generation of nature photographers with his simple, understated forms and subtle desert and mountain landscapes.

“Dear Phil,” Minor White, lead instructor at CSFA, wrote in a letter to Dad in 1950, “Your pictures are as clean as Ansel’s, with a slant of your own seeing. You are starting your career as few of my students have done. In a way I envy your present mastery of the medium…”

By 1971, Ansel Adams wrote that Philip Hyde was “one of the very best photographers of the natural scene in America.” Ansel Adams said he liked Dad’s photograph, “The Minarets from Tarn Above Lake Ediza,” better than his own photograph of the Minarets in the Ansel Adams Wilderness. In 1999, American Photo Magazine named Dad’s “Cathedral in the Desert, Glen Canyon” one of the top 100 photographs of the 20th Century. Dad’s work appeared in more than 75 books, 130 newspapers, 100 exhibitions and over 60 magazines including Audubon, Wilderness, Life, National Geographic, Aperture, Newsweek, Time and Reader’s Digest. He has received many awards including one for lifetime achievement from the North American Nature Photography Association in 1996 and the Albert Bender Award in 1956. The principal artist in over a dozen books, he also wrote magazine articles and an autobiographical essay to accompany his photographs and the writings he selected of John Muir’s in The Range of Light (1992). Dad wrote the text for Drylands: The Deserts of North America (1987), which won three literary awards. Beginning in the 1970s he taught photographic workshops for more than 30 years for organizations such as the Museum of Northern Arizona, John Sexton Workshops, Ansel Adams Gallery Workshops in Yosemite and many other schools of photography.

Dad and Mom stand as examples of how to tread lightly on the earth and find satisfaction in a simple self-sufficient lifestyle. Early in Dad’s career he made a decision to live in the mountains of Northeastern California far away from the photography marketplace. By living in such a remote place, he also gave up the opportunity to be more involved in the Sierra Club and other organizations. With fewer book signings, gallery openings and connections he sacrificed greater financial success to live close to nature.

Mom worked by his side from the beginning. While he attended the California School of Fine Art she worked as the receptionist at the school. Later she became known as an excellent kindergarten teacher and was renowned in the mountain valleys of Plumas County for her knowledge of birds, plants, organic gardening and natural cuisine long before it became popular. Dad thought he would go on working and making photographs his entire life, but in the summer of 1999 he began to lose his eyesight, and within a year he was completely blind.

(See the photograph full screen: Click Here.)

Virginia Creeper, Northern Sierra Nevada, California, 1977, by Philip Hyde. Made more magazine covers than any other Philip Hyde photograph. Example of Straight Photography and colorful enough without amping up the saturation.

Yet Dad proved there is more to vision than eyes and more to seeing than vision. He was one of the first to visualize a civilization in harmony with all life rather than exploiting the Earth as a commodity. In his photography training, as in any good art training, he learned to see deeply. Photography is the art of seeing patterns, forms, relationships that the untrained eye would not see. One day in 1987 he slowed his gait as he passed through our yard at home. He stared at the Virginia Creeper Vines against the weathered gray cedar siding of the house he built. Besides autumn reds, yellows and oranges contrasting with unturned green leaves, some of the leaves reflected blue from the sky. Most eyes do not notice the blue because we automatically edit it to green, the expected color for leaves without the reflected sheen. He ran inside and gathered his wooden Reis tripod and 4X5 Baby Deardorf view camera and set up on our front lawn for one of his most widely-published and exhibited photographs.

By late 2001, his 58-year photography career ended suddenly as his sight fully faded to black and he could no longer make photographs or even print them in his darkroom. Mom acted as his guide, business manager and constant companion. She tried to do the work of two people, keeping up with the photography business and finances as well as maintaining the grounds, house and kitchen. Then the second devastation arrived, Mom died suddenly in March 2002.When she passed on, I moved back to the mountain home where I was born, from my place across the country in upstate New York. We cried, reminisced and cried some more. Sometimes we screamed into the lonely woods, at the sky, at the stars, but the night absorbed it all. In time we began to talk on tape about the many wilderness miles we walked together. Dad described his adventures with Mom seeking the “Good Life” while helping to protect such places as Dinosaur National Monument, The Grand Canyon, The California Redwoods, and many other seashores and wilderness areas of the American West.

Until his death in 2006, I read him the environmental news almost daily. He relied on dreams for glimpses of the natural world he spent a lifetime defending. We sought to make sense of the loss of my mother; the loss of Dad’s eyesight and the state of environmental decline and violence the world is in today. Dad sometimes wondered why he worked so hard. Unfortunately environmental battles are never won, they are merely postponed. The dam site is still there, the mineral resources are still in the ground, the trees are still uncut, the road plans may some day yet destroy the pristine meadow. The beaches are always ripe for new hotels and condominiums. Nonetheless Dad saw clearly two possible visions for the future. In one we continue to poison our home until we destroy ourselves. In the other we learn to live in harmony with life and sustain ourselves on this planet perpetually. In the chapters that follow, I retrace the wanderings of Ardis and Philip and sometimes me tagging along, throughout the wilds on an odyssey through remote terrain from Alaska to Switzerland to Mexico to Southern Utah, my dad’s favorite state besides his home in the mountains of Northern California. All with the purpose of offering a glimpse of how one family lived and did what they could to make a difference and inspire others to do the same, to bring about the future with the most possibilities.

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