May 23, 2002
Contact: Ann Gibb (831) 459-2496; anngibb@cats.ucsc.edu

Valuable photo archive donated to UC Santa Cruz

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

SANTA CRUZ, CA--Renowned nature photographer, author, and environmentalist Philip Hyde has donated the entire archive of his 50-year career, including prints, negatives, correspondence, and field notes, to the University of California, Santa Cruz.

"Philip Hyde, following Ansel Adams and Edward Weston, is one of four or five great photographers of the western landscape," said Allan Dyson, University Librarian. "His archive has particular research value for UCSC, and complements both our photographic collections covering the work of Weston, Adams, and others, and our text archives reflecting decades of local and national environmental legislation."

The Philip Hyde Photographic Archive will reside in Special Collections at the UC Santa Cruz Library, which is located at the center of UCSC's 2,000 acre, redwood forest campus. "I liked the idea of my archive being held in the library of a university that has ties to the environment and has a strong environmental program," said Hyde.

"Philip Hyde is one of the major photographers in the state of California, and he's also extremely prominent in the field of environmental issues," said Al Weber, a colleague and contemporary of Hyde. "His real concern is the protection of nature, and he's used his photographs very effectively for this purpose for the past 50 years." Weber and Special Collections librarian Rita Bottoms were instrumental in helping UCSC acquire the Hyde archive.

A California native, Hyde began photographing nature during his first visit to Yosemite in 1938. He borrowed a Kodak Readyset 120 camera from his sister with the intention of photographing his friends on the trip, but after getting the prints back from the drugstore, discovered nearly all the photos he'd taken were of the country and nature, not people. It was the beginning of a lifelong love of nature and photography. He studied with Ansel Adams after World War II and eventually moved to the northern Sierra as he became, in his words, "a mountain-dwelling photographer of the natural scene."

Hyde joined the Sierra Club in the early 1950s and used his large format, black-and-white photography to support the club's conservation efforts. His first publication, in the 1951 Sierra Annual, was a spread of photographs he had taken the previous year on the Sierra Club's annual "High Trip." Hyde trekked the entire outing with his 5 x 7 view camera slung over his shoulder, mounted on a wooden tripod.

In the years following, Hyde's work appeared in numerous publications of the Sierra Club and other conservation organizations. He also wrote and photographed five books, and contributed the photography for seven more. As he moved from photographing the mountains to photographing the desert, Hyde shifted to color photography, to better capture the chromatic range of the natural scene of the desert.

"Hyde spent much of his career celebrating the form and color of American deserts, but his interpretation was not merely pictorialist," said Christine Bunting, head of collection planning and visual resources librarian at UCSC. "His many publications bear the names of a pantheon of authors, historical and contemporary, who shared his ideological commitment: John Muir, Edward Abbey, Willa Cather, David Brower, and many others." Hyde will be honored later this year with a major exhibition of his work at the International Photography Hall of Fame and Museum in Oklahoma City, Ok.

"Philip's quietly gone about his business of taking photographs to protect nature," said Weber. "I don't know anyone who has done anything with the consistency of nature photography that Philip has done."

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