Hyde, Scott

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 contributed cover photographs for albums by Miles Davis and Dave Brubeck and photographed the artwork of his peers, but his own focus as an artist was distinctly experimental. Over the course of many years 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 in works like "1917 Penny Bridge and County Road, Stony Point, New York" (1968). 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 such as "Lilly Pond I" (1971), he created images from multiple layers of colored ink, deliberately using misaligned registration to separate the colors in the image.

His work is included in the permanent collection of the International Center of Photography and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.