Clyde Hare

Clyde Hare was born in Bloomington, Indiana in 1927. His first experience with photography occurred while serving with the U.S. Navy in the final years of WWII. Hare taught patients at a naval hospital how to use camera controls as a rehabilitation technique. He would later take the first course offered in fine art photography at the University of Indiana, Bloomington. After having his freelance photographs published in several national magazines, Hare attended a photographic workshop at the University of Missouri where he first met Roy Stryker, the father of documentary photography in America. In 1950, not long after graduating from Indiana University with a degree in marketing, Hare moved to Pittsburgh to help document the city’s urban renewal for the Pittsburgh Photographic Library (PPL). He also captured images of the old sections of the North and South Sides, as well as the development of Pittsburgh’s suburbs. At the conclusion of his PPL assignment, Hare joined Stryker again to work on the Jones & Laughlin Photographic File. After the Jones & Laughlin project, he continued to work as a freelance photographer and went on assignments for such national magazines as Life, Fortune, and Time. At National Geographic, Hare produced a series of photographs to complement a 26-page article on Pittsburgh. In 1958, Clyde Hare was the first local photographer to receive a one-man exhibition at Carnegie Institute. He won numerous awards, and has been the subject of articles in national photography magazines. Hare died in 2010 and was memorialized with a retrospective exhibition at Concept Art Gallery.