Philip Hyde

Who was Philip Hyde?

Philip Hyde was a pioneer landscape photographer and conservationist. He attended Ansel Adams' photography program at the California School of Fine Arts, now the San Francisco Art Institute, beginning with the Summer Session in 1946 and enrolling in the full-time professional photography training, the first of its kind, in the Fall of 1947, studying under photographers such as Edward Weston, Minor White, Imogen Cunningham and Dorothea Lange

Hyde became a contributing photographer for the Sierra Club Annual in 1951. He photographed for This is Dinosaur: Echo Park Country and Its Magic Rivers, a 1955 book edited by Wallace Stegner highlighting a proposed dam on the Green River in Dinosaur National Monument in Utah and Colorado, Hyde eventually became the primary conservation photographer for the Sierra Club. David Brower commissioned him to photograph for what came to be known as "battle books,"that helped the Sierra Club lead a coalition of environmental groups to establish or expand numerous national parks, wilderness areas and national seashores. This series of books the Sierra Club called The Exhibit Format Series. The most well-known photographers for the series were Ansel Adams, Eliot Porter and Philip Hyde. The Exhibit Formata Series helped bring national attention to the Sierra Club and the cause of conservation and popularized the coffee table photography book paving the way for thousands of books of this type in the years since.