Willard Van Dyke (December 5, 1906 – January 23, 1986) was an American filmmaker and photographer who believed that photography could have a major influence on the world.
Willard Van Dyke apprenticed with Edward Weston in 1928 and co-founded the Group f/64 in 1932 with Imogen Cunningham, Ansel Adams, and Weston. The group believed in sharp-focus, "straight photography."
In 1935, Van Dyke moved to New York City and began making documentary films with the belief that films "could change the world." His name soon became synonymous with social documentary in the U.S. His images of cotton fields, steel mills and industrial towns, and his portraits of unemployed factory workers and their families, provide an invaluable chronicle of those years and have become timeless examples of cinematic art. He was a cinematographer on Pare Lorentz's The River (1938).
The City, his 1938 collaboration with Ralph Steiner, ran for two years at the 1939 New York World's Fair. During World War II, he produced propaganda movies for the government. In 1948, Van Dyke made the documentary film The Photographer about Edward Weston.
He successfully fought attempts to blacklist him during the 1950s. Van Dyke was director of the Department of Film at the Museum of Modern Art from 1965 to 1974.
In 1967 he was a member of the jury at the 17th Berlin International Film Festival.
In 1960 he was nominated for an Academy Award in the Category of Best Short Subject, Live Action Subjects for: Skyscraper (1960); shared with Shirley Clarke and Irving Jacoby.
In 1978, Van Dyke was awarded the George Eastman Award, given by George Eastman House for distinguished contribution to the art of film.
Famous quotes containing the words van dyke, willard van, willard, van and/or dyke:
“I know that Europe’s wonderful, yet something seems to lack;
The Past is too much with her, and the people looking back.”
—Henry Van Dyke (1852–1933)
“Scientific method is the way to truth, but it affords, even in
principle, no unique definition of truth. Any so-called pragmatic
definition of truth is doomed to failure equally.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)
“Every woman who vacates a place in the teachers’ ranks and enters an unusual line of work, does two excellent things: she makes room for someone waiting for a place and helps to open a new vocation for herself and other women.”
—Frances E. Willard (1839–1898)
“Upon entering my vein, the drug would start a warm edge that would surge along until the brain consumed it in a gentle explosion. It began in the back of the neck and rose rapidly until I felt such pleasure that the world sympathizing took on a soft, lofty appeal.”
—Gus Van Sant, U.S. screenwriter and director, and Dan Yost. Bob Hughes (Matt Dillon)
“Oh, it’s home again, and home again, America for me!
I want a ship that’s westward bound to plow the rolling sea,
To the blessed Land of Room Enough beyond the ocean bars,
Where the air is full of sunlight and the flag is full of stars.”
—Henry Van Dyke (1852–1933)