Clyde Hare was born in 1927 in Bloomington, Indiana. His first experience with photography occurred while serving with the U.S. Navy in the final years of WWII and involved teaching patients at a naval hospital how to use camera controls as a rehabilitation technique. Later, Clyde Hare took 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. Soon after this event, Hare travelled to a regional photo competition in Milwaukee where both Stryker and a man named John Morris from the Ladies' Home Journal were judges. Morris was familiar with Hare's work for the Journal and suggested that Stryker invite him to join the Pittsburgh Photographic Library project.
In 1950, not long after graduating from Indiana University with a degree in marketing, Clyde Hare moved to Pittsburgh to help document the city's urban renewal for the Pittsburgh Photographic Library. On his first day in the city, Hare got lost somewhere in the West End in a borrowed car he drove all the way from Indiana. But with a little help from the locals, Hare soon found his way around and fell in love with his newly adopted city. As a full-time PPL staff photographer, Clyde Hare documented the demolition and reincarnation of the Point: "Downtown was in shambles. Everywhere you looked, something big was coming down or going up, and the earth shook from the piledriving." 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 J&L project, Clyde Hare continued as a freelance photographer and went on assignments for such national magazines as Life, Fortune, and Time. At the National Geographic, apart from being sent to such places as the Arctic and northern Europe, he produced a series of photographs to complement a 26-page article on Pittsburgh. In addition, Clyde Hare has photographed for industrial and trade magazines; worked in the areas of public relations, design and television; collaborated on photography exhibits; lectured; and even taught at Carnegie Mellon University.
In 1958, Hare was the first local photographer to receive a one-man exhibition at Carnegie Institute. He has won numerous awards, and has been the subject of articles in national photography magazines. Of his work, Clyde Hare says, "I made up my mind to take one great photograph each day, one that would live, would be simple, would have something to say."
A selection of photographs taken for both the Jones & Laughlin and Pittsburgh Photographic Library projects are included in a recent book entitled, Clyde Hare's Pittsburgh: Four Decades of Pittsburgh, Frozen in Light, with text by Alan Van Dine. This handsomely produced book was published by the Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation in 1994.
Sources: The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Feb. 15, 1963; Post-Gazette, Feb. 26, 1979; Pittsburgh Press, March 29, 1978; and Clyde Hare's Pittsburgh,by Alan Van Dine (1994).
In addition to Clyde Hare's photographs at the PPL, substantial holdings are maintained at the University of Louisville Photographic Archives (KY) and at the Carnegie Museum of Art. Modest holdings are housed at the George Eastman House in Rochester (NY).
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