Carl Austin Hyatt
Jackie Weik
Carl Austin Hyatt Artist Lecture
April 21st, 2021
Carl Austin Hyatt is a Portsmouth photographer and UNH alumnus who specializes in large-format portraiture and landscapes of his travels, particularly to Peru and the New England seacoast. Hyatt moved to, at the time, a deserted New Hampshire in the 80s and found an overwhelming draw to the rocky seacoast, which ultimately became the reason he stayed. He is incredibly passionate about shamanism and the application of stone religiously with indigenous cultures, through these interests he has now visited Peru 48 times and has documented it through portraiture and landscape work.
Prior to attending the talk, I had visited Hyatt’s website to have some background knowledge on his work. Upon entering his page, I made an immediate connection between his photos and Ansel Adams. The large-format silver gelatin work presenting large mountains and other landscapes sparked this connection for me. Unbeknownst to me, Hyatt had attended a workshop presented by Adams. Hyatt reflected on this in his lecture and announced he was “not impressed” by Adams’ work but learned many valuable things about being a working artist while attending. He cited inspiration from Weston photographically and Thoreau’s Walden textually.
The lecture in its whole was very valuable and convincing to me, Hyatt’s work was incredibly refreshing and gave me hope for my future. To see such well composed work of places just fifteen minutes down the road was inspiring. A point that really resonated with me was when he recounted driving 12 hours to MoMA to hold his negatives up beside the work there while beginning his photographic journey. That struck me as telling to who he is as an artist and person, but also as a very symbolic part of his journey and foreshadowing to his later success. While I do not think I will be taking that long of a trip, it inspired me to push myself further with my work. Something Hyatt said that I immediately wrote down was “bring what you feel alive into an aesthetic medium”, that simple sentence alone struck me deeply and emotionally more than anything else in the lecture. It is incredibly simple but really resonated with me when trying to explain how I feel about personal and abstract work in all mediums.
I genuinely enjoyed Hyatt’s work just from his website and now even more following the lecture. The large-scale work was impressive as someone who finds film photography intimidating, when Hyatt reflected on being primarily self-taught, I found that comforting. This lecture felt less like the artist lectures I had been to in the past and more like an open conversation, when he gave the attendees his personal email address at the end of the lecture my respect for him multiplied not only as an artist, but as a human. That being said, I do wish this had been in person but am understanding as to why it was not. In the lecture Hyatt commented on how he hates presenting work in the digital format and how the presence of his work is part of the experience. While I can go see his work in the museum and enjoy it the way he intended, it would have been interesting to have him walk through with us piece by piece.
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