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 willard van, willard, van and/or dyke:
“Everything to which we concede existence is a posit from the standpoint of a description of the theory-building process, and simultaneously real from the standpoint of the theory that is being built. Nor let us look down on the standpoint of the theory as make-believe; for we can never do better than occupy the standpoint of some theory or other, the best we can muster at the time.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)
“You made me hate myself.”
—Gilbert Ralston, U.S. screenwriter, and Daniel Mann. Willard (Bruce Davison)
“The three main medieval points of view regarding universals are designated by historians as realism, conceptualism, and nominalism. Essentially these same three doctrines reappear in twentieth-century surveys of the philosophy of mathematics under the new names logicism, intuitionism, and formalism.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)
“This is the gospel of labour, ring it, ye bells of the kirk!
The Lord of Love came down from above, to live with the men who work.
This is the rose that He planted, here in the thorn-curst soil:
Heaven is blest with perfect rest, but the blessing of Earth is toil.”
—Henry Van Dyke (1852–1933)