Scott Hyde (American, 1926 – 2021)
Born in Minnesota in 1926, Scott Hyde moved to New York City in the 1940s and began working as a commercial photographer while simultaneously pursuing his own work as an artist. Hyde studied with Joseph Albers and John Cage, associated with artists such as Claes Oldenberg, and exhibited in Roy DeCarava’s short-lived New York gallery devoted to promoting photography as an art form, aptly called, "A Photographer’s Gallery." Hyde worked as both a commercial and artistic photographer, drawing little distinction between the two.
He created abstract photographs, explored a range of printing methods, and combined multiple photographs into new images using the analog processes of the day. In the late 1960s, Hyde explored the visual and metaphorical possibilities of black and white photomontage. He was also among the early artists to adopt the printing technique of color-offset lithography, which became the dominant commercial printing method in the 1950s. Using this technique in works he created images from multiple layers of colored ink, deliberately using misaligned registration to separate the colors in the image.
He is known for his experimental techniques exploring different printing methods & abstract subject matter.
His work was featured in numerous commercial campaigns of the mid- twentieth century, and his photographs graced the covers of albums by Dave Brubeck and Miles Davis. Hyde was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for Photography in 1965.
Hyde’s work is in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Photography, the International Center of Photography, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York among others.