Photography School Vintage Prints 1947-1950
Sun Illuminated Clouds Over Death Valley National Park, California
Sun Illuminated Clouds Over Death Valley National Park, California, 1949. Philip Hyde photographed Death Valley during photography school at the California School of Fine Arts now the San Francisco Art Institute. Ansel Adams’ photography department at CSFA was the first academic program in the country to teach photography as a profession, teaching not only the techniques of photography but the art and esthetics as well. Philip Hyde enrolled in the 1946 Summer Session with Ansel Adams but when he started as a full-time day student in Fall 1947, Ansel Adams had received the Guggenheim Fellowship to photograph the national parks and hired Minor White from Princeton to take his place as lead instructor. Minor White also hired guest lecturers, including luminaries from Group f.64 such as Imogen Cunningham and Dorothea Lange, while Edward Weston became a field instructor. Lisette Model, noted for her close-cropped portrait style, also appeared as a guest lecturer. In the summer breaks from photography school, besides holding full-time jobs, Philip Hyde photographed prolifically, making some of his career's best landscape photographs in a wide diversity of locations all over California and into Oregon and Nevada. In Death Valley in 1949, Philip Hyde made some of his earliest color landscape photographs.
