The Altered Image: Scott Hyde / Betty Hahn

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

The Altered Image: Scott Hyde and Betty Hahn
A Special Online Exhibition

Joseph Bellows Gallery is pleased to announce an online exhibition of works by Scott Hyde (American, 1926–2021) and Betty Hahn (American, born 1940). Bringing together two distinctive approaches to photographic experimentation, the exhibition examines their use of color, historical printing processes, and unconventional materials to expand the possibilities of the photographic print.

Working in New York during the 1960s, Hyde explored gum bichromate, photomontage, screenprinting, and color offset lithography. His experience as a commercial photographer informed his independent work, in which layered images and colored inks became compositional elements. By deliberately misaligning color registration, he separated forms and introduced unexpected color relationships into familiar subjects.

Hyde also created what he called mosaic pictures, assembling photographic fragments into compositions that suggested the spatial complexity of New York landmarks. Other works combined street imagery, popular culture, and reproductions of historical art. By adopting commercial printing methods, he produced original works in multiple impressions and made them accessible to a broader audience.

Betty Hahn began experimenting with gum bichromate in the 1960s, combining photography with hand-applied color and, later, embroidery and other materials. She printed photographic images onto fabric and added hand stitching, bringing materials and techniques associated with domestic craft into photographic practice.

In her best-known series, Lone Ranger, she transforms a publicity photograph of the Lone Ranger and Tonto through silkscreen, cyanotype, photolithography, and Van Dyke printing, sometimes adding pastel and other materials. By repeating the same source image, Hahn makes the printing process itself the subject of the work, showing how color, surface, and context shape our reading of a photograph.

For both artists, process was integral to the picture. Gum bichromate let pigment, surface, and successive printing layers shape the image. Their work belongs to a period when photographers were reconsidering the medium through printmaking, collage, and mixed media. Within that history, Hyde and Hahn developed individual practices that connected photography to wider developments in contemporary art.

Both artists were included in John Szarkowski’s influential Mirrors and Windows: American Photography since 1960, presented at the Museum of Modern Art in 1978. The exhibition included Hyde’s Fruit (1967), a gum bichromate print on vinyl, and Hahn’s Girl by Four Highways (1968). Their inclusion placed these experiments within a major survey of American photography’s development. Hyde had also participated in the museum’s Photography as Printmaking in 1968.

Born in Minnesota in 1926, Hyde moved to New York in the 1940s. He attended John Cage’s experimental composition classes at the New School for Social Research in New York and received a Guggenheim Fellowship in photography in 1965. The Museum of Modern Art, the International Center of Photography, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, among other institutions, hold his work.

Hahn studied with Henry Holmes Smith at Indiana University and subsequently taught at the Rochester Institute of Technology and the University of New Mexico. She received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1974, 1978, and 1983 to support her experimental photographic work. Her work is represented in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Center for Creative Photography, Tucson; the Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena; the Harry Ransom Center, Austin; and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, among others.

Presented together, their works offer collectors an opportunity to examine two significant contributions to the development of experimental photography, when historical processes and commercial printing technologies became sources of renewed artistic inquiry.

Joseph Bellows Gallery
7661 Girard Avenue, La Jolla, California 92037
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